I just saw on cnet news article tonight that Bill Gates is going to announce at Stanford on Tuesday, Feb. 19th that Microsoft will give away dev tools to college students and then high school students. This is not just visual studio, but expression studio and even server 2003 and SQL dev edition. Wow that is very cool and could help the shortage we have in developers in the U.S.
You can see more on this over at Channel 8 on this post http://channel8.msdn.com/Posts/2047/. I am sure it will be all over the news in the morning. This will change a lot in colleges across the world as the cost entry into learning and creating new .NET web applications and desktop apps just got very cheap and easier. This will be very exciting to see the new apps that come out.