Sometimes Microsoft Rocks!!
This is fantastic!
https://downloads.channel8.msdn.com/
Microsoft has made some of their premier devlopment tools available to download for academic purposes. If you can verify that you are a student at a university in one of the countries they recognize (unfirtunately not SA), then you can freely download VS2008 Professional, Windows Server 2003, Expression Studio, and XNA Studio 2.0 (which is free anyway isn't it?).
This is the kinda suff that gets overlooked when people go M$ bashing, and while I appreciate that it's an attempt to give themselves exposure to developers at a grassroots level - it's still giving away the stuff. You look at scholar licenses (as in have to pay for) for other software and it's still pricey, usually has gimped functionality, and has splash screens / watermarks / other annoying stuff in it.
Very, very cool indeed - now only if they'll recognize SA.