Launched by former Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates during a ceremony at Stanford University in February, Microsoft is giving college students access to Visual Studio 2005 Professional Edition, Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition, XNA Game Studio 2.0, and a 12-month free membership to the XNA Creators Club are included in the program.

"The Microsoft DreamSpark program is going extremely well," Microsoft Senior Director of Academic Initiatives Joe Wilson told DailyTech.  "To date, there have been almost a million downloads through Microsoft DreamSpark."

The service is currently available to university students in Belgium, Canada China, Finland, France, Germany, Japan, Singapore, Spain, Sweden, Switzerland, the U.K. and the U.S.  Countries like Australia, Italy, Slovakia and more than 20 others will eventually also receive access to the program.  Furthermore, Microsoft is working to try and include high school students over the next year with plans of global access "in early 2009."

Microsoft has not added additional software to the lineup yet, as the company is more focused on rolling out DreamSpark to additional students worldwide.  Although the company did not disclose how many users have taken advantage of DreamSpark, the numbers are said to be impressive.

The Redmond-based company hopes students will use the free software suite to help develop anything from cell phones and robots to game content that can be ported to the Microsoft Xbox 360 game console.

Even though it may at first seem silly to give away its software to college students to use while they are enrolled, having new technologies written using Microsoft programs will help keep some programmers away from open source alternatives.  In addition, Microsoft has agreements with many universities to offer software to students and staff at a reduced price or for free.

Microsoft believes in the power of technology to transform education, foster local innovation and enable jobs and economic growth for everyone. Microsoft DreamSpark is just another way of helping this next generation of young leaders seize the opportunity to harness software’s transformative magic," Wilson added to finish our conversation.  "In giving tech tools away without charge to college students around the world, Microsoft is providing future developers and designers with professional-grade tools to create and expand their skills."

I became a participant in the DreamSpark program immediately after it was announced, and have been pleased with the level of support from Microsoft and the community.  I'm far from an open source guru, but have dabbled with open source programming compilers and similar things in the past, but will continue to utilize DreamSpark and open source for my programming needs.

I've mainly stuck to Visual Studio 2008 Professional Edition and playing with Expression Media and Expression Blend, but plan on using the XNA Game Studio 2.0 and utilizing the free membership to the XNA Creators Club later this summer.  If you're a student at a university, and can prove it, I recommend giving DreamSpark for a quick spin.

Have any of you utilized DreamSpark yet?  If so, what do you think of the service?