Getting started as a developer, courtesy of Microsoft?!?!
Normally, I’m pretty negative about Microsoft and their whole culture. I’ve tried deciphering all of the dev-speak, gobly gook, and acronymn-mania that Microsoft has at Technet and MSDN. Trying to make sense of their documentation as a neophyte is pretty daunting when it comes to trying to learn. Microsoft seems to operate on the assumption that to learn something, your going to have to buy the book, so why try to make things easy to understand. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not criticizing them because they are successful mind you, I just disagree with some of the decisions that they have made in that success to try to maintain it.
I’ve not seen anything truly ‘revolutionary’ out of Redmond for a long, long while. I’ve seen controversial aplenty, but not anything truly original. I may have to reconsider that opinion in light of a new resource that Microsoft has launched. It’s a website called the “Beginner Developer Learning Center” located at Microsoft’s MSDN center. Someone over at M$ seems to have had the inspiration that if they make the windows application development platform available freely to the public, along with tutorials, lessons, and other resources designed around teaching people how to use it effectively, that they will draw in a fraction of the upcoming generations of programmers.
The website is broken down into two main categories, the Web development track, and the Windows Application development track. In each of the categories, or sections, it is further broken down into three Tiers.
- Tier One - “Tier 1 Lessons are a great place to start if you’re brand-new to programming. Most of these lessons don’t assume any prior software development knowledge and will take the time to introduce basic concepts.”
- Tier Two - “Tier 2 Lessons assume you understand the foundations of .NET development. These lessons will proceed at a faster pace, and cover a lot of the core concepts of Windows and Web development. By the end of these lessons, you should be able to create a basic, working application!”
- Tier Three - “Tier 3 Lessons follow up on the skills learned in Tier 2. These lessons expand your knowledge of Windows and Web development with more advanced concepts such as data access and debugging. If you finish the Tier 3 lessons, Congratulations – you’ve graduated from the Beginner Developer Learning Center and can officially call yourself a Software Developer!”
Take a look at the website here at Beginner Developer Learning Center!
