Stories
Tagged with Training
My ASP.NET Core and Vue.js Workshop in Atlanta
After spending most of my time creating online courses, I realized I missed the gratification that I get from face-to-face training. I've decided to do 3-4 workshops a year.
To start this workshop, I'm starting with my home town of Atlanta. On January 16-18th, I'm having a three day workshop to teach how to build a website using ASP.NET Core 2.2 and Vue.js.
The workshop will use the following technologies:
New Day for Wilder Minds Training
As many of you know, I've been making courses for Pluralsight for a long time now. I think my first course was released in 2011.
I made a decision early on to only make Pluralsight video courses so that I didn't have to worry about exclusivity of topics. They've made me very happy over the years. But I think it's time to stretch a little.
This big change is coming about as a result of how successful Pluralsight has become. Because so many authors want to make courses for them, I don't always have the chance to write about topics I am invested in. I can't blame them. The difficulty in keeping all the authors happy cannot be an easy one.
New ASP.NET Core 2 Workshop in Atlanta
I'm getting back into face-to-face training. And I'm starting with a new workshop on ASP.NET Core 2 and Angular 5. If you're in Atlanta or can get here, I'll be doing a three-day workshop from May 16-18th this year.
Here's a little bit about the workshop:
Building websites is a common task for almost any developer. But building a website includes many discrete tasks including UI design, creating services, coding in a backend and frontend language, data store design and security. It can be daunting to be good at all these tasks at once. That is where this course comes in.
New Year, New Skills: ASP.NET Core 2.0 and Angular Course
Nothing starts a new year like a new skill or two. A couple of months ago I released a new Pluralsight course on building a website using ASP.NET Core 2.0 and Angular.
If you're looking to prepare for the future of web development, I think my course does a good job of teaching the technologies involved. This is a great time of year to start looking at the new stack.
If you haven't taken one of my courses before, you might be surprised by the way that I teach. This course walks you through building a website from File->New to publishing the site. The course covers the following topics:
New Training Options at WilderMinds
I know that some people learn better in-person than online, so starting next month I’ll be back to offering in-person courses. These includes some of the same topics as my popular Pluralsight course, as well as topics that are not covered there.
These in-person training courses can be customized for your company’s particular needs and skill level of students. Feel free to take a look at my company’s website for more details.
The new courses include:
Using VS Code and ASP.NET Core?
Developers are an odd beast. Some developers love a big IDE and lots of automation to help them create great solutions.
The other type of developer, wants to write code quickly and spends a lot of time at the command-line. Luckily, Microsoft supports both types of developer.
Even though I use Visual Studio quite a lot, the brevity of Code allows me to be faster sometimes. Because of this I created a course showing how to use VS Code with ASP.NET Core projects.
New Course on Building an API with ASP.NET Core
Are you new to ASP.NET Core? Maybe you’re building an API for your SPA, mobile app, or just your web app. I recently released a new Pluralsight course that can help you.
This new, six-hour, course covers the basics of building REST APIs with ASP.NET Core. Whether you’re just exposing your data via REST, or building microservices, this new course should have you covered.
Here is a preview of what the course contains:
ASP.NET 5 and Bower
As most of you already know, I have a new course on ASP.NET 5. I’ve just released a teaser video that shows how the Bower.json editor in Visual Studio works.
The course was recently updated to use the ASP.NET Beta 8 bits. I am looking forward to the next update of ASP.NET and expect to continue to update the course all the way through the RTM.
If you haven’t used Bower before, it is a package manager for client-side projects (i.e. jQuery, Bootstrap, Angular, etc.). Visual Studio makes this easy in the new incarnation and this clip shows you how it works. This video is from the third module of the course.
New Course on ASP.NET 5!
If you read my blog, you probably already know how excited I am about ASP.NET 5. To dovetail with that, I’ve created a nine-hour course on Pluralsight that covers this brand-new technology from Redmond.
This new course is similar to my end-to-end course on ASP.NET 4/MVC5 that I released a couple of years ago. The goal of the course is to teach you all the concepts while helping you build a simple web app.
You can find the course here:
New ASPNET5 Course Coming
I’m diligently working towards my new Pluralsight course and I am very excited about it. The new course is an end-to-end building of a web app using ASP.NET 5, MVC6, Entity Framework 7, Angular 1.4, and Bootstrap 3.x.
This course is a bit different than other courses I’ve done because we’re releasing it before the RTM of ASP.NET 5. Because of this, I wanted to let my students know what to expect.
The course will build a web app from an empty ASP.NET 5 project through to a deployed app. This mirrors my ASP.NET MVC5 course from a couple of years ago, but is written with the new stack. The course will build a whole new project as well. This time, you’ll be building a tool for trip planning called “The World”.
Mapping Between Entities and View Models
As many of you know, my recent course on Pluralsight dealt with Best Practices in ASP.NET: Entities, Validation and View Models. As I’ve worked with clients, there seem to be a non-ending list of ways to deal with data in ASP.NET.
One of the topics that I am passionate about as it relates to the course is how to manage the Model to Entity relationship. While being pragmatic is important, I still believe that there are many situations where you want a separate Model for a view (server or client-side) instead of just using the Entities that you’re storing data with.
The challenge here is how to do the mapping between the entities and models without having to churn out tons of boilerplate. Luckily, there are a number of solutions including AutoMapper.
My Entities, Validation and View Models Course
A few weeks back, I released a new course on Pluralsight. This new course talks through what I consider “Best Practices” (though there are no absolutes) for ASP.NET Entities, View Models, and Validation.
I was tremendously pleased to find it made it into the top ten courses for a few days. It seems to be resonating with some students and that makes me really happy. If you’re writing ASP.NET code, this course could make your job easier!
The course covers:
My New Course: WebStorm Fundamentals
Last week my seventeenth course for Pluralsight! I love building content for Pluralsight and it allows me to teach technologies that I am utilizing in my own life. This new course is no different.
The new course is all about using WebStorm 9 to build web applications. The course was built using the WebStorm 9 EAP so I was able to cover new features as well as the basics.
The course is taught over six modules covering everything from basic HTML, CSS, and JavaScript but also delving into more advanced features of the IDE. The topics covered include:
New Course: Front-end Web Dev Quick Start
It’s that time again. I’ve recently released a new course on Pluralsight. This time I tackle Web Development for complete beginners.
If you are a developer who wants to move from either back-end development or from desktop development to client-side web development, this course may be for you. The concept around the course is to get you up to speed with the very basics of web development in a short amount of time. In fact, in just over three hours, you should be able to get a basic understanding of web development.
After viewing my course, there are other courses that will take you through deeper knowledge of modern web development, but the basics is where you should probably start. In the course we cover the bare bones that you need including:
New Course on .NET Code Reviews
One of the things that I help companies with are code reviews. I love doing code reviews. It let’s me look at a large codebase with fresh eyes and help a company out with a set of recommendations for improving their process, teams and code.
After doing enough of these some patterns emerged. From this has come my new Pluralsight course on Lessons Learned from Real World .NET Code Reviews.
The purpose of this new course is to show you some of the lessons that can be learned through code reviews. I’ve broken up the lessons into several parts:
I'm Coming to Belgium to Teach Web Development
As many of you know, I am heading out on World Tour this June and heading across Europe and Asia for a year. For the first stop, I’ve partnered with Sparkles to do a training in Belgium this June. If you’re in Europe and you’ve been looking for a way to easily take my web development course, this is your opportunity. We’re only holding it once in Northern Europe.
The course takes place from June 23-25th, 2014. If you’re in the area, this is a great opportunity to learn how to build websites using the ASP.NET on the back-end and open source tools like Bootstrap 3 and AngularJS on the front-end.
This course is a three-days, hands-on course that covers how to build web applications using the Microsoft’s ASP.NET stack including:
Node.js for .NET Developers
As some of you may have noticed, I’ve been dipping more than my toe in the waters of Node.js. I think Node.js has a lot to teach us as ASP.NET Web Developers; most of it good.
To this end, I’ve produced a brand-new course for Pluralsight about Node.js specifically for .NET developers. This course covers using Node.js with Visual Studio as well as the command-line tools. It compares and contrasts .NET technologies to their Node.js equivalents.
The point of the course is to walk you through creating an entire small website with Node.js and teaching you along the way (similar to my End-to-End ASP.NET course on Pluralsight). It includes:
New Pluralsight Course on Large Scale JavaScript
I am having a great time building courses for Pluralsight. While my early courses focused on XAML technologies, the past few years I’ve been loving building web, HTML and JavaScript focused courses. I’m proud to announce my latest course is now live.
This new course is focused on teaching you how to handle the problems involved in building Large Scale JavaScript projects both in the browser and on the server (e.g. NodeJS).
This course is called:
New to Web API? Don't Rush to Implementation
I’ve been getting good feedback on my Web API course on Pluralsight but some of the comments have concerned me. Lots of the students (from my small sample size) seem to be trying to infer how to *design* an API, not just implement one. That course is specifically about how to implement an API.
What’s important as far as I am concerned is to well design the API (regardless of which way you implement the API). So if you’re starting to use Web API and you need an API for your app, for your customers, or for others to consume (e.g. 3rd party developers) – stop figuring out how to implement the API and go back and design the API.
This is especially important if you are new to the notions of REST. Essentially, you need to understand the ‘Why’ instead of focusing so much on ‘How’.
JavaScript Function Scopes
As some of you know, I authored a Pluralsight course on JavaScript for C# Developers. We’ve released an excerpt from that course covering how JavaScript function scopes work.
If you’re just getting started learning JavaScript, it can be easy to bring your C# biases to the language since they both have curly braces. Hopefully this excerpt will help:
Refactoring Nested CSS Rules using LESS
One of my favorite features of LESS is the ability to simplify my CSS rules that are deeply nested by using LESS to compose them more simply. I like this feature because it gives me the ability to clean up messy CSS files and make them more maintainable. Take a look to see what I am talking about.
LESS is an open-source dynamic stylesheet language for adding features to the CSS language that help you build better CSS. LESS parsing is supported in the free Web Essentials extension for Visual Studio 2012 and 2013 (though not supported for the Express editions) as well as in the free WebMatrix tool from Microsoft. It is also supported in most IDEs, as a JavaScript library and even a command-line LESS builder.
You can view this excerpt from my Pluralsight course covering Web Debugging with Firebug, Fiddler and more. If you want to view the entire course, you can find it here:
My New Web Development Course is Live
Are you getting ready to build a new website? Are you interested in shortening your development by using Bootstrap, AngularJS, Azure and ASP.NET? If so, my new course might be just for you.
In this new course I build a new web site from scratch. I start out with a Bootstrap template (since my design skills suck) and move through creating content, building a database, exposing a REST-ful API and building a Single Page Application. I wrap it up by publishing the site to Azure Web Sites showing you how to not only get your application up an running in the cloud, but also how to monitor it and handle standard tasks like using your own domain in Azure.
You will see every line of code (with one small exception) that I write. This isn't slide-ware…it's show-n-tell. I use a range of technologies including:
JavaScript for C# Developers Live!
If you're in the Atlanta, I am holding a one-day JavaScript for the C# Developer course. The course will cover:
This is the perfect course for existing .NET developers who are trying to get up to speed with JavaScript for web development or Windows 8 App development. The course will take place on November 14th and costs $299.99. You can register for the event here:
The complete outline can be seen on the course page on my Wilder Minds site here:
My New Course: JavaScript for C# Devs
If you are a C# developer who is ready to take on JavaScript, I have the course for you. The goal of the new course is to help C# developers understand the nature of JavaScript so you can write JavaScript like a native speaker. This is for developers who need JavaScript for any of the popular places to use JavaScript including:
The course aims to map C# features directly to JavaScript features so you can understand many key topics including:
This course is not platform focused but language focused so no matter where you're going to use JavaScript, I hope this course can help you ramp up quickly to the language! See it here:
What is Wilder Minds?
As many of you have known for a while, I've been running my AgiliTrain training company focusing on technologies like Silverlight, WPF and the Web. My interest in training isn't going away, but I've yearned to work with a small group of thought leaders to help companies in more innovative ways. With this goal in mind, I am launching Wilder Minds.
The vision for Wilder Minds is to be a complete solution for companies who are trying to move to new technologies (like Windows 8, HTML5/JS, Mobile Development, node.js, etc.) Instead of just doing training, we're expanding to help in three primary ways:
Wilder Minds is still focused on training. We are still building and teaching our courseware as we did as AgiliTrain. This hasn't changed. We have adapted to the changing way people are taking training and suspending our publically-held courses. We won't be doing our "Tours" any longer, but we will continue to teach our courses (and custom courseware) as clients request them. In addition, we're continuing to build courses for PluralSight and do some remote classes. Training is still a major focus of this new venture.