Microsoft thinks of the children with VS2013 Git release

Microsoft has clambered aboard GitHub's educational effort, tossing Visual Studio Community 2013 and a few other goodies into the mix.

The Github Student Development Pack was launched last year, targeting aspiring devs aged 13 and over.

Visual Studio Community 2013 (launched in 2014, natch) is already free, so the aim is apparently to get a broader audience for the student offering. Microsoft is also tossing in Azure hosting (including as many as ten Websites and ten mobile services for free).

As well as the standard VSC 2013 stuff – support for C#, Node.js, Python, F#, Visual Basic and the like – students who can back their claim with a student number will get access to Visual Studio Online for project planning, bug tracking, and build support.

There's also access to Microsoft's Dreamspark offerings, including SQL Server, training courses and Windows Store developer accounts. Microsoft's participation was announced in this blog post by S. Somasegar.

There are now 14 contributions to the GitHub pack, with participants including Unreal Engine game development tools, the Atom hackable text editor, various cloud offerings, Hackhands developer assistance and a bunch of other tools.

Microsoft's increasing interest in GitHub got another kick along during the weekend, with the company releasing its Bond framework on the code-host.

Discussed here at Reddit, Bond is a cross-platform serialisation library that Microsoft explains is “addresses similar scenarios to Protocol Buffers, Thrift and Avro”.

Its FAQ document further explains that in Bond, “serialisation and deserialization are not fundamental operations hard-coded in the generated code. In fact there is no code generated that is specific to serialisation and deserialization.” ®