Microsoft expressed its full support for creative students in several countries, such as the United States, China, the United Kingdom, France and Germany, as part of the DreamSpark program, and said it will offer them high-end tools for software application development.

The program already started among college students in several countries, and Microsoft is ready to expand it even further this year. Starting this week, Microsoft’s Visual Studio Professional Edition for software development, Expression Studio for Web design and programming, together with XNA Game Studio 2.0 for video games, SQL Server 2005 Developer Edition and Windows Server Standard Edition will become available for free downloads for students.

"We give up some revenue, but we gain the fact that we'll get the feedback of these students, get more courses to incorporate our tools into the programs and get more startups where kids are familiar with Visual Studio, Expression Studio and SQL Server," Gates said in an interview, the Associated Press reports.

Up until this point, the program has managed to reach a limited number of students, but Microsoft is planning on expanding it in the near future. Starting next year, DreamSpark will reach other college and high-schools on a world-wide scale. This year, tens of millions of students benefit from Microsoft’s initiative.

Microsoft Chairman Bill Gates is expected to officially announce the program in a speech held at Stanford University on Tuesday. The students will highly benefit from Microsoft’s initiative, which opens numerous possibilities with a small number of tools, as Joe Wilson, Microsoft’s senior director of academic initiatives, pointed out.

Microsoft officials announced that high-school students, who are under-aged and cannot sign license agreements, will be able to do that through one of their teachers starting with the second half of this year. And Microsoft’s plan shouldn’t come as a surprise, considering its own founder was a student when he established the base of his company.