hi my name is steve, i will help you. contact me at ...
First of all I'd be very wary of the above post. As a new forum member, I think you need to demonstrate honourable intentions by helping out on the forum rather than through direct email.
I'm going to assume you need to learn programming as part of your University course since you've downloaded the software via DreamSpark (excellent scheme). However, do you know what programming language you are going to be learning? If you're going to be learning Java/Python for example, there's not much point bothering with any of the software you've downloaded because what you've downloaded are exclusively Microsoft technologies focusing on their .NET platform.
If you are specifically focusing on .NET then and if you're specifically focusing on programming then Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 are the 2 programs you actually want to bother using at this stage. Visual Studio 2010 is the latest version of Microsoft's IDE and is
THE tool for actual programminng, where as Expression Studio is much more a web/graphic designer set of tools and probably less condusive to learning programming than using Visual Studio.
There are 2 primary programming languages that .NET uses - C# and Visual Basic .NET (VB.NET). Of the 2, I would recommend learning C#.
C# Tutorials:
C# Programming Tutorials by Blackwasp
MSDN C# tutorials
If you're going to be doing web development, then you'll want to try experimenting with ASP.NET since this is the web application framework component of .NET. If you're you're doing desktop applications then you'll be looking more at WPF/Windows Forms applications - knowing what sort of programming/applications you'll be developing in advance will help you get more experience with the respective disciplines required for development of either application type.
I'd start out small and just get familiar with language syntax and then experiment with some of the controls on offer.
SQL Tutorials:
SQL Tutorials from W3Schools - this is the actual SQL syntax/language and can be applied to just about any database product, including SQL Server and are great tutorials.
Above all else, just experiment and ask questions if you get stuck.
Good luck
