Two Microsoft .NET Developer Events in DFW, You Must Attend

If you are a budding .NET developer looking to kick start your career in 2011 or advance your career on Microsoft .NET technologies, here are two great events right here in DFW that you must attend.

Windows Azure 2 Day BootCamp : 16th and 17th February 2011

This is a 2-day deep dive program to prepare you to deliver solutions on the Windows Azure Platform. We have worked to bring the region’s best Azure experts together to teach you how to work in the cloud. Each day will be filled with training, discussion, reviewing real scenarios, and hands on labs.

More Details and Registration here.

Dallas Day of Dot Net : 4th and 5th of March 2011

With Phil Haack kicking off the 2 day event with ASP.NET MVC 3, it got 2 days of immersive .NET programs including but not limited to “Windows phone, Azure, C# 4.0, HTML 5, Asp.Net MVC 3, WPF, Silverlight”. The event is priced at $200, but all proceeds go towards helping a cancer patient.

More Details and Registration here.

Live as if you were to die tomorrow. Learn as if you were to live forever. -Gandhi

Dallas : Two Days of Immersive .NET Training

Two days of totally immersive hands-on .NET  training.

Three tracks to fit your profile.

Right here in DFW. ( @Microsoft Campus, Irving TX)

All for $125.

$50 Early bird discount if you signup before 7th Dec, 2010. ( Use Coupon Code: JeffreyPalermo )

Visit the first ever Dallas Day Of Dot Net for more details.

Exploring .NET Framework : What you can do with .NET?

If you are wondering what you can do with .NET, check this out. Its a beautifully designed Silverlight application that provide an overview of full stack of technologies and frameworks for .NET development.

Contextual.NET : New Training Program For The Experienced

“Understanding a technology is only a starting point. Applying it in the right context is what matters”

This has been our core belief and guiding principle and also one of the distinct values we provide in our Training programs. Most other training programs excel at teaching ‘what is’ and ‘how to use’ technology.   Our Programs go beyond and put participants directly in the context of real world application scenarios and help them choose a strategy, concept or a technique out of all available options and given a set of unique constraints of a project. We teach key techniques and considerations that will help to evaluate an approach, not just from technical point of view, but also from the business value point of view.  So the focus has always been not just to learn but to apply.

However, most of this content like case studies, brainstorming sessions, evaluation techniques and guidelines is  currently deeply integrated with the rest of the curriculum in a course.  Every participant must attend the full program to leverage this knowledge, even though they may be well conversant with the ‘what’ and ‘how to use’ of the technology already. 

Over the last couple of months, we have been extracting these case studies, brainstorming sessions, evaluation techniques and guidelines in order to create a course on its own, to address this need for Experienced developers. Today we are happy to announce the name of this  new program, ‘Contextual .NET’, a program for the experienced .NET Developers.  The course will go live in the first week of October.  I will publish more details of the program: detailed content, duration, location and fee in the next couple of days.

Get ready to get contextual.  Apply technology you already know in a way that really matters, to the business.

Not just technology, but what matters.

Teaching Online : Surprises and Challenges At First

"Unleash Your Career" is one of our premier sessions where IT professionals come and explore various career opportunities and carve out a blue print to achieve their dreams.

On 10th of April 2010, we had our first ever online version of “Unleash Your Career” program on Supercool School. We did stream some of our sessions live on the internet earlier, but those sessions were held in a class room environment with some students attending those sessions in person. So, This was our first fully ONLINE session.

The program was a great success and we have received lots of great feedback. But not without a few surprises and challenges. To start with, presenting just by sitting in front of a computer with nobody around felt little strange and scary for a while. But we know we would make it through. And we did. We have organized about 90 hours of training so far fully (and just) online and going strong.

It has been quite a ride so far. Thought, we would write about our experiences teaching online as it may help others thinking of teaching online.  Here is our first video talking about three challenges and surprises from the first session.

In the upcoming posts and/or videos, will share how we worked around some of those challenges and learned our way through in organizing online training effectively.

Teaching Online : Digital Whiteboard Vs. Physical Whiteboard

Adios Amigo, Power point. This was the first thing we did, after we noticed that teaching online isn’t as easy as we thought. Power Point presentations (for that matter any prepared or structured presentations) may be good for certain types of information exchange, but we felt, they are not definitely meant for teaching a technology.

We improvise our training programs almost every minute. So we keep our planning and teaching material to the least possible. This will let us fine tune our programs, examples and illustrations based on audience, time of the day or even based on events that happened that morning. With prepared presentation, we really got bored ourselves talking about the same old thing. And as mentioned earlier, Power point presentations proved to be quite rigid. It was quite difficult to let ideas flow and in more than one way forced us to kiss good bye to improvisation.

And we had a terrible experience using a digital whiteboard in place of a normal, traditional, physical whiteboard, call us old school. Even with a Wacom touch pad. It was a whole lot difficult to draw something on digital white board than we ever thought, an absolute thought breaker. So, we turned to what we are most comfortable with. A physical, traditional and old school white board. And we positioned a Logitech webcam to capture the whiteboard and feed the video on the screen in stead of a power point presentation. We felt real good and now back to our free style and lively training session.

We tend to believe that we could actually cover more with a free form, in a way that is more relevant and easily understandable than a fixed form presentation.

Call it old school, but teaching is never better.

Teaching Online : What We Have Learnt So Far

“Unleash Your Career”, was our first ever program on Supercool School, and officially our first ‘exclusively online’ program. We did stream some of our sessions live on the internet, but those sessions were held in a class room environment with some students attending those sessions in person. This was our first fully ONLINE session. We were both excited and anxious on how it would go. But it went quite well. We have also received great feedback about the session.

But, who could judge the quality of your performance better than yourself. So, once the session was over we sat for a review. We watched the whole recording ourselves. We immediately noticed it wasn’t up to our own expectations. We watched it twice just to make sure.  It was in fact quite terrible by our own standards. We made a note of few things that we could immediately improve while some needs a bit more practice and getting used to.

Since then, we have been working on our shortcomings and getting better day by day with each session. Though we believe, there is not much you can learn by just reading this (but a whole lot just by actually doing it), we would like to share a few challenges or hurdles in teaching online, that we noticed.

• No visual cues from participants, left us guessing about how well audience were receiving the presentation.
• Power point presentations proved to be quite rigid. It was quite difficult to let ideas flow and in more than one way forced us to kiss good bye to improvisation.
• It was a whole lot difficult to draw something on digital white board than we ever thought, an absolute thought breaker.
• The only way you can project your passion or enthusiasm in teaching is by projecting all that in your voice. Not an easy task, leave alone effectiveness.
• You can’t move freely. for that matter, if you don’t have a wireless microphone, you are literally stuck to your chair. You may loose body language, most importantly your gestures that convey so much meaning in a class room environment.

In later posts, we will share how a few changes we made in the setup have been helping us to do it much better than our first session and getting much better session by session.