Today we officially launched a new area on Channel 9, the Channel 9 Learning Center. This is an area where we’ll provide free training courses (videos, hands-on labs, and code samples) on emerging products and technologies, with our first set of training courses being Windows 7 and Visual Studio. As more products/technology betas get released, you can expect us to add additional training courses into the Learning Center. For more information on training courses, subscribe to the Learn blog which will have regular updates on new and upcoming content on the Learning Center.
Why are we doing this?
One of the key pieces of feedback from our Channel 9 user survey is that you wanted more technical content, especially on new products and technologies. Our goal with learning centers is to make it easy for developers to pick up and play with new products, APIs, SDKs, etc and to make the learning experience social. This is our first step towards that goal.
Taking a tour
To get a feel for the Channel 9 Learning Center, we wanted to give you a quick screenshot tour of what’s included.
Learning Center Home Page
The Learning Center home page includes the aforementioned Learning team’s blog and the list of courses on the right side. For our tour, we’ll click into the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Course.
Visual Studio 2010 Training Course Home page
This is the home page for a training course and it includes:
· Breadcrumb navigation at the very top for easy navigation.
· A list of pre-requisites including experience or tools, frameworks, and SDKs you need to complete the course.
· Each course is broken down into a set of topics or units like Managed Language, ASP.NET 4, the Data Platform and so forth.
· The full training kit is available for download in the top right corner for anyone looking to do offline learning.
· The list of team members who built the training course are in the right column.
Managed Languages page
Here you’ll find a set of videos and hands-on labs that cover that particular topic. Note that Hands-on labs have the orange bubbly beaker image icon.
Hands on labs – Introduction to F#
Each hands on lab comes with
· A table of contents with all of the exercises for the Hands-on lab
· A download link to download the hands-on lab for offline use and any associated source code examples
· The ability to share (on Twitter, Facebook, etc), rate, and comment on the lab
· A list of resources for the Hands-on lab.
Inside a Hands-On lab
Once you’re inside the Hands-On lab, there’s a two column layout, the left column represent the Hands-on lab content and the right column provides quick navigation to other parts of the Hands on lab.
At the end of each lab exercise, you’ll also see a convenience link to jump to the next exercise in the Hands-on lab.
Feedback
Well, that’s our quick and dirty tour, as always, we’re open to your feedback and we hope you find this type of technical content valuable.
Cheers,
The Channel 9 & Learning Team
