Professional Developer and Designer (Microsoft Software ) for students tools at no charge

For the first time, Microsoft is giving its valuable software developer and design tools directly to students worldwide at no charge! This site enables students like you to download professional-level Microsoft developer and design tools to unlock your creative potential and set you on the path to academic and career success, by supporting and advancing your learning and skills through technical design, technology, math, science and engineering activities.

Among the products available currently are Windows Server, the Expression Suite of products, XNA Game Studio, SQL Server and the new Visual Studio.

In order to get this software from Microsoft at no charge, you will be asked to establish or verify your student status once every 12 months. This process is built into this DreamSpark site itself. Verification of valid student status will enable students from around the globe to download Microsoft developer and design tools at no charge.

Note: You must be at least 18 years old or have otherwise reached the age of majority in the place (province, state or country) where you live, or if not, your parent or legal guardian must accept the Microsoft DreamSpark software license terms on your behalf, in order for you to download and use the software.

Visit DreamSpark for more details

Yahoo for Sale !!

Microsoft Proposes Acquisition of Yahoo! for $31 per Share. Transaction valued at approximately $44.6 billion in cash and stock; provides 62 percent premium to current trading price for Yahoo! shareholders; combined entity to create a more competitive company, providing superior value to shareholders, better choice and innovation for customers and partners.
Microsoft’s proposal would allow the Yahoo! shareholders to elect to receive cash or a fixed number of shares of Microsoft common stock, with the total consideration payable to Yahoo! shareholders consisting of one-half cash and one-half Microsoft common stock.
Microsoft will probably borrow money for the first time to finance its proposed $44.6 billion takeover of Yahoo, chief financial officer Chris Liddell said.
Microsoft took on $80 million in debt from AQuantive when it bought the Internet advertising company for $6 billion in August. Both the AQuantive acquisition and the proposed take-over of Sunnyvale, California-based Yahoo are part of Microsoft’s effort to compete with Google in the $40 billion-a-year market for Internet search services and advertising.
Know more about the deal.

Microsoft HealthVault

When it's your job to protect your family's health, you need every advantage. Imagine if you had a way to collect, store, and share the health information critical to your family's well-being.

HealthVault is the new and FREE way to do just that.

Imagine controlling the flow of your health information. Whether you need to search the Web for the most up-to-date treatments, catalog existing health records, receive test results, or monitor current physical readings — HealthVault gives you the control you need.

Be well. Protected.

Microsoft's Tafiti: A Silverlight based tool powered by Live Search

Microsoft’s latest experimental release Tafiti is an eye catching, interesting and innovative search tool built on top of Windows Live Search and Silverlight.

Tafiti, which means "do research" in Swahili(a sub-Saharan language), enhances searching on the web by allowing users to search, save, e-mail results across multiple queries and sessions.

Tafiti is based on Release Candidate (RC) of the Silverlight 1.0 browser plug-in and it runs everywhere Silverlight does i.e. On Vista, XP SP2 running IE 6, IE 7, Mozilla Firefox 1.5.0.8 and Firefox 2.0.x; and on Mac OS X using Firefox 1.5.0.8 and Firefox 2.0.x

All you need to have is a pre-release version of Silverlight installed which comes free as of now.

My initial experience with Tafiti revealed these facts:

• Search results can be dragged from the results pane to a shelf, be labeled and stacked upon.The stack content can be edited, saved or e-mailed to someone else.

• There is a Tree View where by search results are placed on the branches of a tree which can be rotated and zoomed as necessary to visualize the search results.

• Tafiti includes a carousel to simplify the organization of returned search results. By rotating the carousel, one can access search results from the web, images, news, RSS feeds, or books.

• One major hitch in the tool is, one can’t right click the links to open in a new tab.

For the ones who’s looking for a simple search, may be a text based search such as, Google, Yahoo will serve the purpose but if you want to experience the Search then surely Tafiti has something new to offer you.

It’s just designed to show off the kinds of apps developers can build using Silverlight.

Watch a Video to know more about Tafiti.