One thousand thanks to all the people that have given me free software! It’s always nice to be able to develop on the cheap. Let’s see who I can thank - first of all, Microsoft Student Insiders hooked me up with a free MSDN account, which is no small feat. MSDN gives me virtually all Microsoft software ever, for the lovely price of $11,899. Thanks to the Student Insiders, I got it for $0. I highly recommend getting it - perhaps a cheaper package, though - you get support from Microsoft, a ton of software, and more stuff that I could never list in full. Things that I’ve used MSDN for: Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, Windows 7 Ultimate, Office 2010.
In addition to free MSDN, JetBrains has given me a free license for ReSharper, which is easily the best add-in for Visual Studio 2010 you could ever get. It does everything you ever wanted Visual Studio to do, and again I highly recommend it. JetBrains gives out free licenses for open source projects and was impressed by tiDE.
Finally, I’d like to do a call out to Codeplex. All though they haven’t done anything special for me as an individual, they provide a great service to the .NET community. Codeplex provides hosting for many of my open source projects, including all sorts of source control - SVN, TFS, Mercurial, etc. You can keep tabs on my Codeplex account to see all sorts of new and exciting open source projects. You can only see a couple of projects there now, but I promise that there are a few more projects that are hidden from view at the moment.
In other news, I’ll be picking Windows Phone 7 development back up again, and you can expect lots of information about Mango and all the cool, open-source apps you could ever want.