Does MS still give out Windows Phones

 to developers? 

Hey all, I'm a UNLV student working on a XNA game which I hope to port to Windows Phone once it's done. As part of a project for a Software Engineering course, we're required to pitch a working app that is done in three weeks' time to our class. Then we may move on to another app or keep working on it and present it in the senior design presentations.

The only problem with my idea is that I don't have a smartphone, nor the money to get one. So far the game has been developed with Windows in mind using the Reach profile for easy WP porting, but since mobile programming is the in-thing right now, getting it working on the phone would be a big plus and since XNA makes it so easy, it shouldn't be a problem.

You can check the entire source code of our app right here (it is a work-in-progress):

https://github.com/Ernesto01/applesgame

The MS documentation for XNA has been of great help, since we're a team of three coders, we know little of making art assets, so we've been using MS samples' art assets. We've been learning C#/XNA on our own, since our school has no course that touches C# or XNA, actually the only non-open source tech that is taught is Objective-C and Xcode for iphone programming, our curriculum is mostly based on C++ and Java. 

I know of Dreamspark and MSDNAA for software, and I heard something about MS giving some phones to devs under special circumstances but I am not aware of the details or even if it still exists. Any light on this would be appreciated. 

Try to find out if there is a MS student rep in your university and ping him.

If you're app is very near completion you might want to (quickly) join the 30 to Launch contest, where you could win a Lumia 800. Otherwise, as PaoloM says, try to contact a MS student rep. Not only does Microsoft occasionally provide phones, but Nokia is even getting into that game in order to promote development for the phone. Unfortunately, I don't know of any easy way to find out if you qualify or how to obtain one of these. This site might help you, though I know nothing about the program: https://www.microsoftstudentpartners.com/publicpages/welcome.aspx?ReturnUrl=%2f_layouts%2fAuthenticate.aspx%3fSource%3d%252F&Source=%2F.

 Thanks for the responses. Unfortunately there doesn't seem to be a MS student rep in our school and I'm in my last semester so starting as a MS student partner is not feasible. I will look into the 30 days to launch contest though, there's still a lot of work to do on our XNA game but I've been doing 10 hour coding sessions for this to get it to where it is in less than a week, in any case it's worth a shot.