Pluralsight On-Demand Training : Now Starts at $29/m

Pluralsight has slashed its prices and now a monthly subscription to their FULL library costs just $29 per month.  Compare it to earlier pricing of $99/month, it’s a drastic reduction.

More over if you are in India, the monthly subscription costs even lower, $14.99 per month.

If you are a .NET developer or aspiring to become one, this is really a great news. I personally loved their videos and definitely recommend to anybody.

Link : Pluralsight On-Demand Access Pricing Plans

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.

Future of Silverlight : Fire Starter on 2nd Dec 2010

Here is a great opportunity to learn more about Silverlight. A FULL day FREE Fire Starter Event on Silverlight on 2nd Dec 2010.  Great news is that the event is streamed online so you can watch from anywhere in the world.  Register for the event here.

Microsoft PDC 2010 : Video RSS Feeds

Microsoft’s Developer eco-system is arguably one of the best and probably lot more active than others out there. And the eco-system produces tons of multi-media content. But I always cringe when I don’t see an RSS Feed with Media Enclosures that users can readily subscribe and watch or download instantly.  Its always left to somebody to help us out.

PDC 2010 web site is a nice Silverlight application.  And absolutely no HTML fall back incase somebody doesn’t have a Silverlight plugin installed.  And of course, no RSS Feed (yet) as usual.

Thanks a ton to Greg Duncan for providing a full list of Videos (with all formats available) and associated RSS Feeds that you can readily subscribe.  Visit his blog post and access either the individual list or RSS Feeds of your favorite formats here. 

If you want to watch those Videos on your iPad or iPhone, try MP4(low) format.

Active Player

If you don’t have a Media Player or Application that can consume those RSS Feeds and instantly playback, take a look at Active Player.  Not only it help you subscribe to RSS Feeds, it also let you take notes, bookmark those videos or even create clips of those videos for sharing or review later.  Here is a snapshot of the Active Player playing a Video from PDC2010 feed.

Active Feeds : Create an RSS Feed of your Favorite Videos

I built a small Google App Engine app, called Active Feeds recently to create your own RSS Feed from videos from anywhere on the web and share with the world. I quickly built a set of RSS Feeds for Videos available at ASP.NET to demonstrate.  Next time, if you want to create an RSS Feed with your favorite Videos, check it out. The application needs lots of work to make it more user friendly but as of now is fully functional to use.

Free E-Book : Programming Windows Phone 7

If you are tinkering on developing .NET Applications on Windows Mobile 7, here is a free eBook from Microsoft Press by Charles Petzold, that can get you started.  The book is available in PDF and XPS formats.

Some more free e-Books for .NET Developers moving to VS 2010 here.

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.

Quote : Internet is a medium based on interruption

Google may be helping us to find content faster and better. But Google is definitely changing the way we learn, think, organize and work.

Internet is a medium based on interruption — and it's changing the way people read and process information. We've come to associate the acquisition of wisdom with deep reading and solitary concentration, and there's not much of that to be found online.

-- Nicholas Carr

( Read/Listen to NPR Interview with Nicholas Carr here  Or Download MP3 )

You can read the first article that voiced the concern and later grew to a book called “The Shallows” here: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”.

The Productivity Paradox

Little experiment that is worth trying, if you haven’t yet : Try blocking access to Internet for your Software development team and see how it would impact the overall productivity and quality of the team.

Trends : C# or VB.NET

There is a heated discussion going on at LinkedIn in .NET People's group about what is the most preferred .NET Programming Language : VB or C#.  I don't want to add fuel to the fire, but just wanted to point out search patterns for C# and VB.NET on Google. As usual, interpretation is left to you.

Trends : ASP.NET MVC Vs Ruby on Rails (RoR)

While discussing about the trend charts of .NET Versions over lunch yesterday, the discussion led to ASP.NET MVC and how does it fare against Ruby On Rails (ROR). Ofcourse, we are just talking about Search Patterns here.  So here is the search Patterns chart between RoR and ASP.NET MVC.

It is quite a surprising chart though. Try interpreting the chart and let us know your thoughts.

TDD : Quality Software Vs Healthy Software ( Kent Beck )

Listen to this wonderful presentation by Kent Beck on Developer Testing.

Kent Beck is widely recognized as the father of eXtreme Programming and JUnit. Kent's other contributions to software development include patterns for software, and the rediscovery of test-first programming. He is the author/co-author of Extreme Programming Explained: Embrace Change 2nd Edition, Contributing to Eclipse, Test-Driven Development: By Example, Planning Extreme Programming, The Smalltalk Best Practice Patterns, and the JUnit Pocket Guide. He received his B.S. and M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Oregon. Source : Kent Beck on Developer Testing.

Active Player Now Plays YouTube Videos

Go ahead and grab the latest version of the Active Player as the new version now plays YouTube videos too. You can add individual YouTube videos by the URL or you can subscribe to RSS Feeds that contain YouTube videos.

Adding a Single YouTube Video to your Collections

Let me quickly show you how simply you can add a YouTube video to your collections.

On the left side Toolbar,  click on (Web Icon). It will open up “Add a Media File From Internet” popup.

Once you enter the URL, it automatically picks up the type of Video as “Youtube Videos”. Fill in the rest details of the YouTube video and click on “Save”. The application will save the Video details and instantly start playing the video right within the Active Player itself.

The player will be automatically resized to fit the size of the window as you resize the Active Player.

Subscribing to YouTube RSS Feeds

Now let us see how quickly you can subscribe to RSS Feed with YouTube Videos. Go to http://www.youtube.com/rssls and grab an RSS feed you are interested in. You can pick up a variety of RSS Feeds like user feeds, featured videos, recently added, videos of a specific tag etc. I will pick up an RSS Feed of Youtube videos with “india” in tags.

Click on RSS Feed icon on the left side tool bar. It will open up the familiar “Add a Feed” form. In the form, fill in the RSS Feed URL and click on “Add”.

Active Player will grab the feed and display details of the feed. Update feed details as you like, add the feed to collections you want and click on “Save”. I have added to “My Favorites” and updated the title a bit.

Active Player will load the feed items to your collection. That’s all it takes. Now any time a new video is posted on Youtube with “india” in tags, you are ready to watch the video with a single click. Here we go, I am playing the India’s $35 laptop video right away.

Anytime, you would like to play the Youtube video on the original Youtube page, click on   to go to original Youtube page.

Hope, you will like this. If you haven’t grabbed Active Player, you can install the Player from here. Let us know what you think.

Active Learning : The Four Generations Of Active Player

It was so thrilling to see how Active Player went through 4 major iterations in the last 6 years, since I built the first draft version back in August of 2004. As far as I can remember, so far the application has been used by about 1400 users to learn from various videos and webcasts. I am quite excited to see how many more will find it useful, now that the application is open to all.

I would like to share, what motivated me to develop this kind of application in the first place in a separate post. Here is a rundown on the memory lane and various features (as far as I could recollect) included in each of those versions.

First Generation : August of 2004

• Built and runs on .NET 1.1
• Opens Media files that are stored locally on a computer or on the internet.
• Once the file is loaded, it will read any information about Chapters (markers) in the file and display in Media Chapters section.
• User can add his/her own bookmarks on the media file that will show up in the bottom half of the sidebar.
• Bookmarks are stored in an xml file, named after the media file name and stored in the same location. So when you open a media file, it automatically picks up the bookmarks file as well.
• Optionally, user can choose a specific bookmark file, like a centralized file with all bookmarks in one place to quickly move between different video files.
• To share, user just need to email the Bookmarks file to a friend/colleague.

Second Generation  April 2006

• Supports everything as in first generation.
• Re-organized the visual layout and built on .NET 2.0 with VS2005
• Side bar now has tabbed panels, with each tab occupy the sidebar space fully.
• Introduced Clips, where a portion of the video can be marked for replay later on.
• Also introduced facility to play “All Clips” together. Great for students, as it would help to quickly revisit all those important portions from different videos.
• No longer support one bookmark file for each media file, but forces a centralized and default bookmark file. So user never have to specify a bookmark file.
• User can open a different bookmark file if wants to. For instance, when a friend shares his/her bookmarks file, a user can open that bookmark file and access all those bookmarks and clips.

A web-based version of Active Player Feb, 2007

Created a web based Active Player for creating bookmarks and clips on MP3 files in Feb 2007 and presented it in Democamp Dallas in Feb, 2007. Later this application has been enhanced to support video files by embedding various video players in the browser.  This web application was discontinued later in the year due to little change of priorities.

Started working on a web based Active Player a couple of weeks back and will release some time in November, 2010.

Here is a snapshot of the MP3 Active Player from the democamp. You can see more pictures here.

Third Generation, May 2009

• Started using Click Once Deployment.
• The application has been redesigned for visual layout and built on .NET 3.5.
• Included support for RSS Feed subscriptions as well Subscription from custom Feeds from the Training classroom website (INSPIONS University).
• Storage has been upgraded from XML file to SQL Server Compact Edition. But the data structures are kept intact from XML file version for backward compatibility.
• Added concept of Collections, where Media files can be organized into groups/collections.
• Support downloading media files from RSS Subscriptions and files directly added.
• Separate tabs for Bookmarks and Clips.

Latest and the 4th Generation, July/Aug 2010

• Quite significant changes in the software architecture itself.
• Included support to embed Apple Quicktime along with Microsoft Windows Media Player, so abstracted the MediaPlayer code to generic interface and built a repository for media players to be selected based on file format.
• All feed fetching, syncing and downloading operations moved to separate background worker threads.
• Completely redesigned the database schema and internal data structures and now using Entity Models instead of typed datasets from earlier versions.
• Removed support for custom XML formats and streamlined all Collections to RSS Feed specification. So every thing will be now an RSS Feed/collection.
• Visual layout has been modified for much better cleaner and slim look and gives full space to the video being played.
• Tab bars have been split and pushed to the sides, keeping in view the wide screen monitors that are shorter but wider in nature.
• Bookmarks/Clips have been combined in to one tree view.
• Display Bookmarks/Clips of the current media file opened top in the view and rest of the files below.
• On minimizing or closing, application now just minimizes to the tray.
• Restricted to single instance of the application running at any point.
• Now need explicit but FREE Activation to keep track of some stats from each individual user as well as to build a community of users for better sharing and collaboration.
• Social aspects like pushing user updates and bookmarks/clips to social networking websites are coming soon.

So, here we are with the latest and 4th generation of the Application. Now that, the application is open to all, I hope many more people may find it useful for learning online.

Active Learning Tools : In Private Beta Now !!

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

I am so thrilled to announce that the first Application of Active Learning Tools Suite is now in Private Beta . In next couple of weeks, will roll out a public beta so that everybody can give it a try.

Wondering what is the application is all about, well, I can’t say much about it right now other than sharing this beautiful snapshot of the application.

If I must say in a couple of lines, what this is all about, it is “An application to learn. A platform to share. For those, that loves to learn and inspired to teach”.

Stay tuned for more updates and a chance to try out the public beta.

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.

Getting Real With .NET Technologies : How .NET Developers See It ?

Source : darkgreyindustries.com , thanks to Arvind for the tip

VS2010 : Even The Basic ASP.NET Web App Looks Slick and Complete

No doubt, Visual Studio 2010,  to be officially released next week (12th April, 2010) is loaded with lots of new features.  We would like to share about some nifty features we liked as we discover.

Here is one to start with. Its about the new and improved ASP.NET Web Application template. When you create a project with ASP.NET Web application template in Visual Studio 2008 or any earlier editions, all you get is a Single Empty Page web application.

But with Visual Studio 2010, even the basic ASP.NET Web Application looks quite stylish, slick and sexy.

Now the template includes a cool Style, Pages needed for basic Account Management (Register, Login, Change Password), a Default Home page with a Master Template enriched with Navigation and added some introductory text on pages. The app also include jQuery library and associated VS Metadata file to support Intellisense for jQuery library. It even includes the Global.asax file.

That means, when you create a new project template, its in fact almost ready for deployment as your first draft version of an application. Just hook your database, add some context to your application, you can start accepting memberships too.

Not that doing any of those above is difficult, but having them as default in the template, saves time, give that ‘rapid’ development a new feather and makes us like VS2010 even more.

PS: If you haven’t signed up for the VS2010 Virtual Launch Event, go ahead and signup now.