Microsoft and GitHub-Free tools for student developers

Students passionate about open-source development have long loved and used GitHub - our friends at GitHub have built a great community, of which we know students are a big part. We love GitHub too. When we recently open-sourced .NET Core, we chose GitHub as its home — and .NET Core on GitHub has already had 175+ pull requests.
The GitHub Student Developer Pack is a great free offer for those students, with terrific tools and services from GitHub partners, but felt it could use something more: our world-class IDE. Today we’ve announced that Visual Studio Community 2013 is joining the GitHub Student Developer Pack, and is tailor-made for the student, startup, open-source, and cross-plat communities, many of whom can be found on GitHub already.
In addition to Visual Studio Community, students will also find additional tools and services including:

• Visual Studio:  The tools, designers and debuggers you need for your next project – with support for web, mobile, desktop and cloud apps using C#, Node.js, Python, F#, VB and more. 
• Visual Studio Online: Tools for planning, backlogs, tracking bugs and running builds and continuous integration – all in one place.  Visual Studio Online accounts are free for up to 5 users.
• Microsoft Azure:  Host apps in the cloud on a platform that supports any OS, any language and any framework.  Microsoft Azure subscriptions include 10 free web sites and 10 free mobile services.

At the same time, we’re inviting GitHub-loving students to check out more of our great free tools, including SQL Server and Windows Store developer accounts, as well as great free training courses on Microsoft Virtual Academy, including how to get started with GitHub in Visual Studio.
We’ve been connecting students with our dev tools for years.  With partners like GitHub, we continue to ensure student developers worldwide have access to the tools and resources they need to continue building their skills and bringing their ideas to life.