If you have not heard about a website by MSFT called … Dreamspark .. & you are a student then this post is just for you. Actually Dreamspark itself is a program sponsored by Microsoft to provide students free software and tools which are used by professionals for development … and designing. If you have looked at this site, they really have great tools for absolutely no cost like… Windows Server 2008/2003 std edition ($745 @ Amazon), Visual Studio 2005/2008/2010 Professional edition ($723 @ Amazon), Expression Studio 4 Ultimate Edition ($558 @ Amazon) or SQL Server 2008 Dev. edition ($54 @ Amazon) … if you are a student then you will really know that how it is great to have these kind of software for free. Actually other than that, they offer many other software for free like Virtual PC, Game Studio, Robotics Dev. Studio, Multipoint, Embedded CE etc.
Also, if you want to take MSFT certification exams, you can get extra discount for being student !!!
To get access to Dreamspark, all you need to have is an email ID with .EDU domain. Or say, your university email id 
… and with quick registration process you will have access to Dreamspark … and next step is to just select software that you want to download and enjoy it … 
Also, if you are like me who like to study by them self, I guess among all other companies MSFT have super great community support (I am not a MSFT fan boy, I have been long time user of Linux … and still have dual boot machine with 7 in one partition and Ubuntu in another partition. 
) … You can look at resources like Channel 9, MSDN, ASP.NET, CodePlex and lots of blogs of MSFT MVPs + newsgroups …
Don’t think MSFT is doing all of this things just to relive the guilt of other over charged customers 
… but they want to give it free, because if as a student you start using MSFT products from the early days of your education, then when you will go for work in future you will be very familiar of MSFT products and environment … so you will likely to want work on MSFT products … so I think it as a beneficial for both students and MSFT.
So, get going and make this world a better place (sort of) …
It’s Just a Thought … 