I finally have a cable modem again and a little bit of free time. The past month has been a very busy one. I've had a few very important life events in the past month.
1) I graduated from college. (finally!)
2) I replaced the engine in my car. (too much work...)
3) I got engaged. (Yay! (or finally!))
4) I moved to Austin, TX. (hot)
5) I started a new job. (training sucks)
I'm getting settled in so I can start blogging and programming again. I was starting to get a little restless. Now I just need to find Jessie a programming job and we'll be set.
Alex Lowe mentioned a few things Microsoft was doing to promote .NET to college students. Since I was involved in these type of activities last year I thought I would add a few comments to the things Alex mentioned.
The MSDNAA program is a great program if departments use it correctly. For $800 a year they can have all the OS's and Development apps for installation on all their lab computers and for handing out to faculty and students. Microsoft also provides server software a department can setup so students can download the ISO images. This way the departments dont need to check out CD's. Most departments I talked to about this were interested in it for providing software for their labs but they did not wish to distribute it to students because they did not want keep track of CD's or setup a server for downloading images.
The program Alex did not mention that I wanted to comment about was the Student Ambassador (SA) program. I was a member of this program last year and I am very excited to see how it does over the next few years. The thing that makes the SA program great is the fact that the SA is a student from the school.. The SA is choosen by Microsoft and their job is to promote MSDNAA, start user groups, hold programming competitions, and have "tech-talks". I held about 10 tech talks over the year on topics covering the whole .NET spectrum. At my school, students would hardly get any exposure to .NET without this program. I know I got a lot of students interested in .NET through these tech talks and other promotion.
It will always be a battle for .NET to get accepted at many colleges. Some professors feel moraly obligated to steer students away from Microsoft products. Some do so because they are affraid of learning new things, some think Microsoft is evil, and others just think Microsoft products suck. I was really amazed by some of the coversations I had and emails I received from some professors.