Microsoft makes a version of Azure free for student developers

Microsoft is making a show of reaching out to young developers this week by making a suite of Azure development tools and learning materials freely available to students registered in its Dreamspark educational program.

Though the program is aimed at developers of all stripes, game makers may find the new tools and resources useful in light of the company's efforts to paint its Azure distributed computing platform as a "cloud" workhorse that developers can offload processing tasks to in games running on Microsoft hardware or software.

The package also incorporates Visual Studio Online, a version of Microsoft's venerable development toolset that offers developers a set of Azure-backed code repository and source control tools. 

Further details on the package can be found in this Microsoft blog post, and developers with a verified Dreamspark account can access the new Azure tools and resources right now via the Dreamspark website.