Microsoft Virtual Academy

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com

by AndreyKarpov • 12 years ago

85 46 12 years ago

microsoftvirtualacademy.com

oakwhiz• 12 years ago

Some of these courses are not really that great - sometimes you learn more from the help files and manuals...

tracker17• 12 years ago

And some people need more hand holding, especially dipping their toes into waters they've never been in before.

chris_wot• 12 years ago

They have a hell of a lot of technologies. But how many of them are going to be around in the long term?

gtirloni• 12 years ago

You should apply the same criticism to open source projects (specially the weekly new programming language in HN).

martiuk• 12 years ago

You'd be surprised, since the company I work for uses Microsoft for nearly everything, they'll gladly jump onto anything Microsoft technology-wise. Heck I had to convince most of my colleagues that an open-source library wasn't the end of the world.

rbanffy4• 12 years ago

What one person calls free online courses, others call marketing materials. The knowledge obtained in most of them is not easily transferable to other technology stacks.

welder• 12 years ago

You're exactly right! Just look how many times he says Visual Web Developer Express Edition:

http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/Content/ViewContent.a...

yulaow• 12 years ago

Well.. it is their free ide for the web... What would you expcect?

Really, is like bashing a company just because it is called Microsoft. What if I tell you there are hackers who love it?

stinos• 12 years ago

What one person calls free online courses, others call marketing material

These are both. Not just one, nor just the other

The knowledge obtained in most of them is not easily transferable to other technology stack.

that is questionable at least. For example for programming laguages they teach both the language and the tools. The language is easily transferable. Well it's not even a transfer, it's just the language [1]. And the tools might be pretty similar depending on which stask you transfer to.

[1] apart from possible minor differences of course, like in the C++ compiler. Not sure if there is a difference for things like JavaScript?

tracker17• 12 years ago

A bit of the JS stuff seems to be geared towards writing Windows 8 UI apps... so that's not really transferable, but I think it is at least interesting... Also, some of it can apply to say GTK apps.

lewispollard• 12 years ago

It might have been a different training program, but Microsoft used to award points for completing these kinds of training exercises, which you could redeem for physical goods like keyboard, mice, xbox controllers, games etc. So it was pretty clearly a marketing device back then.

mhurron• 12 years ago

The knowledge obtained in most of them is not easily transferable to other technology stacks

That's not really a problem when you are interested in learning this specific technology stack.

This is complaining that learning Windows Server administration didn't prepare you for managing a Linux server. At some point in time, you learn specifics.

zeroDivisible2• 12 years ago

As much as I understand what you're saying in here (and I'm not defending Microsoft, because it's not my favourite tech company), would you expect them giving courses about J2EE and how to use Erlang?

tracker17• 12 years ago

I can say I was at least a little surprised they didn't have anything for node.js, considering how much they're starting to use it internally, and how much they've invested into getting node.js working as a first class citizen in Windows.

rbanffy4• 12 years ago

I don't know about Erlang, but a lot of J2EE deployments are on Windows servers. It would make some sense even if the goal was to sell Windows servers.

jbigelow76• 12 years ago

    >The knowledge obtained in most of them is not easily transferable to other technology stacks.

This is like complaining that French courses leave you unable to converse in German. Most rational people wouldn't expect otherwise.

rbanffy4• 12 years ago

These are actually courses on how to order food at French McDonald's stores. They are absolutely useless if you want to go to any other restaurant in France.

300bps• 12 years ago

4 hours old article, 4 comments before this one. Every one with a complaint.

I guess Microsoft can't even give away free training materials without criticism.

UweSchmidt2• 12 years ago

They are not even complaints, just a mild general annoyance with the whole Microsoft thing, happens often on HN. Nothing wrong with it, except:

Since I happened to have subscribed to some of MS's tech stack, I would find it interesting to read about specific problem with MS tech. For example, RoR's security and performance issues are discussed in great detail here, may I assume that Microsoft MVC 5 (as a direct competitor to RoR) is scalable, secure and well designed?

simplyinfinity• 12 years ago

I'm writing a multitenant (serving different domains)hosted CMS with mvc 4 (will update dlls to mvc5 and code to async soon ). if your architecture is good and you know how to do caching you will be good to go for many users to come :) (asuming you have nginx in front iis is simply not designed for that purpose)

rdudek• 12 years ago

Same goes for PHP and Ruby on Rails. Hater's gonna hate.

I ignore 90% of negativity on HN unless there is constructive criticism.

I do what I like and there is no one out there that will change my opinion of it. Because if I was to follow everyone's opinion, nothing would get done and I would not be as successful as I currently am :)

hedwall• 12 years ago

Is it some sort of affiliate link? (?mtag=XXXXXXXX part)

sergiotapia• 12 years ago

Yes it's for an MVP user with ID XYZ, submitter submitted the link with a referral.

RamiK• 12 years ago

Seems decent enough to me. If I can park a non-tech staffer on an Excel course for an hour instead of having to hold his/hers hand and explain how a spreadsheet works I call that a win.

nocoment• 12 years ago

I hadn't thought of Excel, good point. But I'm not sure which of these Office classes it is hidden in?

I'm also always looking for HTML/CSS/JavaScript classes that might reach non-Programmers. I might sit someone down in front of: http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/training-courses/html...

... and see what happens.

tracker17• 12 years ago

I was thinking the JavaScript for absolute beginners also looked like a good one for getting non-programmers into.

I don't think that JS is necessarily the best learning language, but it's definitely about as wide spread as it gets (being out of the box for every modern OS that comes with a browser).

merrua• 12 years ago

These have been here for ages? Most of these are not new?

chrislomax• 12 years ago

I signed up as it does look interesting. Some people say it's been round for a while, I didn't know about it.

Tried to sign up and got a "Federation error"! Excellent

teddyh• 12 years ago

They were already giving their products to schools for free (or very cheap), and encouraging classes to be specific to Microsoft products. This is merely the logical next step.

tracker17• 12 years ago

I would think this would probably have come before some of the school deals. I don't feel that this is a bad thing in general, and honestly far better than some of the backroom deals they've done.

graycat5• 12 years ago

Okay, I watched the first Visual Web Developer (VWD) video. Questions for anyone out of the first grade with this stuff; four questions:

(1) I'm building a Web site where the server side code is in Visual Basic .NET with use of classes from the .NET Framework and also from ASP.NET and ADO.NET, but as far as I know I'm not using the 'framework' of 'model, view, controller' (MVC) and, so far, see no such need. What's the big deal of MVC?

That is, the code for one of my Web pages has standard, 'reserved named', ASP.NET 'event handlers'

     Sub Page_Init
     Sub Page_Load
     Sub Page_PreRender
     Sub Page_Unload

So, when I need to do something, say, with SQL Server database or communicate with a server in my 'server farm', e.g., my session state server and two more I have, I just write a function in the code of the Web page and call it from an appropriate one of those standard ASP.NET event handlers.

Question 1: I see nothing wrong with this approach to 'code organization' and, thus, am missing the big deal of MVC. What the heck am I missing about the value of MVC?

(2) [Long question] What am I missing on The video explained how the VWD 'integrated development environment' (IDE) is easier to use as something to type into than Microsoft's Notepad. It's also easier to use than a sharp stick on a wet clay tablet!

But I don't type into Notepad and, instead, use my favorite programmable editor I've used for essentially all my typing for some decades, KEdit. That editor is a PC version of IBM's mainframe editor XEDIT, and the macro language is Mike Cowlishaw's elegant Rexx.

From all I can see writing code, KEdit looks much better than Visual Studio, especially since my project 'folder' is really simple and easy to understand and since I get to write macros to automate some work whenever helpful. The times I looked at all the files Visual Studio creates for a 'project'; they were a lot to understand; I didn't understand them; and I fear that in case there were problems I would have to understand them. Bummer.

E.g., here's a variable: What is its type, that is, where is its Visual Basic (VB) Dim statement, and what is the scope of the variable, i.g., where the heck was it declared? Where else have I used this variable?

My guess would be that any good, programmable editor could be as powerful as KEdit or better -- Emacs anyone?

E.g., some of my comments are really 'code section delimiters' recognized by some of my KEdit macros and, this way, I can get some easy views of the overall organization of my code, e.g., for scope of names.

E.g., my most recent nice KEdit macro is BEIDC for 'begin, end insert dated comment'. So, I get, say

     '    BEGIN Modified at 11:31:29 on Monday, February 17th, 2014.
     '    END Modified at 11:31:29 on Monday, February 17th, 2014.

and then type code and comments between these two. Another macro lets me see all lines with, say, the fourth token on one of those two lines, and that operation is sufficient for me, given one of those two comments, to move to just where the other one is.

And I have macros that make use of KEdit's 'point' facility that lets me give names to 'pointers' to particular lines. One macros shows me all such 'pointers' and saves them to a file for loading, say, the next day. So, with these pointers, I can jump around in a file quickly. So, maybe the code I am writing needs to draw from three other places in my file; so have four such 'line pointers'. Works well, and a dozen more lines of macro code can make it work better.

For 'Intellisense', from all I can see and saw in the VWD video, no thanks: For the classes in the .NET Framework, there are some thousands, my guess, 20,000+, Web pages of documentation at Microsoft's MSDN Web site. So, before I use a .NET class I download the relevant Web pages of documentation from MSDN and, for each such Web page, make a little abstract. I put the abstract in one of four simple text files (one file for each of Windows, VB, TCP/IP, etc., and SQL Server) I maintain with KEdit. Currently I have 5000+ such Web pages and abstracts and can find relevant documentation quickly just by using the KEdit search tools on the text files with the abstracts -- each abstract has both the URL of the Web page at MSDN and also the tree name of the Web page on my hard disk.

In my code, for crucial such Web pages, I put a VB comment with the title of the Web page and the tree name on my hard disk of my downloaded copy of the Web page. Then in my editor, one keystroke displays the Web page. So, if I want to check something in the documentation, it's one or a few keystrokes in my editor, and, then, I get the relevant Web page with essentially the most detailed documentation Microsoft has. Also relevant is my earlier code with tested uses of that .NET class; the way my work is organized makes it easy for me to find such code. Of course, I also have files of notes, old programs, and old test programs and can also have the corresponding tree names in my comments. I'm not getting just why, net, in practice, 'Intellisense' is better or as good.

My code is just awash in comments at various levels, much like writing a technical paper: For me, when I return to some code six months later, those comments are a great advantage. But writing those comments makes good usage of the power of KEdit, my macros, and even my usual spell checker -- with Visual Studio Web Developer I'd miss such functionality.

I do not like the way Visual Studio uses the screen and makes use of many small windows. Instead, I just use the window management facilities of Windows. Typically I have a dozen+ windows on my screen, and I keep them organized partly with some code triggered by one icon in the UL corner of the screen; then all the windows maintain their Z-order but are arranged so that the UL corner of each window is equally spaced on a line from the top center or so of the screen to the left center. Then at least a little of each window is visible, and I can see all of any window easily from just a slight change in the Z-order without moving any of the windows.

Net, the video made Visual Web Developer look like a big step down from just my usage of a good text editor.

Question 2: What am I missing on why VWD and Intellisense are better than what I'm already doing?

(3) Hearing the title Visual Web Developer, I guessed that the software was a way to position 'controls' on a screen, set values for relevant HTML and CSS attributes, e.g., fonts, colors, borders, and then have the ASP.NET code for those controls written automatically or some such.

As it is, if I have a complicated Web page to lay out, 'design', then I use, say, Microsoft's PhotoDraw to decide what the page should look like.

Question 3: Are there better tools for designing Web pages than just something like PhotoDraw? What are they? Are there tools that would take such a graphical design and generate the corresponding ASP.NET class instances and class method invocations? What are such tools? Are they actually helpful, worthwhile?

(4) The VWD video was writing JavaScript to generate a text box. Curious. What's the point here? While Microsoft's ASP.NET has written some JavaScript for me, so far I have yet to write a single line of it and see no need to.

My guess is that the JavaScript, running in the client's browser, adds the text box to the 'document object model' (DOM) at the client.

Question 4: Is this so? Or is the point that the JavaScript code actually runs on the server and generates the HTML and CSS 'mark up' on the server and does not send that JavaScript code to the client?

sixothree3• 12 years ago

You can drag windows out of Visual Studio by their tab and they will form a new window. You can group as many tabs in new windows as you like.

graycat5• 12 years ago

This may have something to do with 'dockable' windows?

sixothree3• 12 years ago

Where else have I used this variable?

Right click a variable and choose Find All References.

graycat5• 12 years ago

Good! They thought of that!

At some points I guessed that it was easier for me to develop what I wanted using KEdit and its macro language than just to find how to do the same things from the Visual Studio documentation.

sixothree3• 12 years ago

You can right click any file in Solution Explorer and choose Open With KEdit. Visual studio will recognize the change and if the file is open ask you to reload.

graycat5• 12 years ago

Thanks! Good: I'd get to type into KEdit instead of just some text box!

nswanberg• 12 years ago

Assuming these are genuine and not the world's longest rhetorical questions:

1) There is nothing wrong with your approach. There is nothing that can be done using ASP.NET MVC that cannot be done with the ASP.NET Webforms pattern (I'm not sure if there is a generic term for the single-file pattern that classic ASP, JSP, AOLServer, etc use). You are smart and working alone, and quite likely the innovations in your application will not be made in the way in which you concatenate strings to generate HTML.

2) Again, you are not missing anything by using your years of experience with KEdit and Rexx, except possibly a job working on internal HR applications at an insurance company. Intellisense and VWD are tools designed for programmers with a range of experience to be productive enough so as not to be a net loss for their team. I make websites with ASP.NET MVC and use Visual Studio to do it. Would I consider KEdit? Probably not--I lack your experience with KEdit, and when I want to deal exclusively with text I use Emacs. And why use intellisense? Your method of creating abstracts for the .NET class library is a great one, and one that a lot of people could learn from. But that is not reality in the everyday .NET development world. Intellisense allows those developers to navigate both the .NET libraries and their teammates' ad-hoc classes.

3) I'll pass--I didn't watch the video.

4) Almost certainly the text box was generated as an example. It's possible that most sites using javascript nowadays do so only because yet other sites use javascript. But where javascript is used well it is indispensable. Part of the original appeal of both Google Maps and Gmail was the pleasant user interface enabled with javascript. If your site is a means to an end and the users are willing to put a lot of effort into the result--say, as an extreme example, a form that takes some account information and literally gives the user money--there is little you could gain from javascript. But if you want to do what you can to make a user's experience a pleasant or even delightful one, javascript is frequently the best way to achieve that.

graycat5• 12 years ago

Many thanks for your feedback and judgment.

No, the questions are not just rhetorical and, instead, are fully real for me.

Yes, so far, at least for my version 1.0 live site (soon, soon, soon!), it seems to me that my simple HTML and CSS without any JavaScript from me will provide a good enough 'user interface' with a good enough 'user experience'. One advantage of my approach: It's dirt simple for the user.

Yes, the user interface of Google Maps is astounding, but I did have to download and enable a Firefox plug-in. I recently used Google Maps to find the house I grew up in, the house of my high school girlfriend, the house of my wife's family, my current house, etc. Amazing work. My Web site needs nothing like that.

So, my site has nothing that pops up, pulls down, or jumps around.

The Google home page was long very simple -- just type into a 'text box' and hit enter and get back some pages of links with some short descriptions. Now, of course, apparently each keystroke into the text box goes back to a Google server which does amazing things and updates the screen, sometimes once for each keystroke -- nice programming, timing, etc., but it will be a long time until my Web site needs such nice refinement.

Microsoft Virtual Academy

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