Dan Sullivan has just published a new course: 
.NET Regular Expressions
The .NET Regex course is not a generic regular expression course, it is about the specific syntax of regular expressions used by the Regex class in .NET. The Regex class is one of the richest implementations of regular expressions on any platform and this course methodically goes through each of these features. If in the past you have found regular expressions to be somewhat opaque, this is the course for you.
Thomas Lee has just published a new course: WMI and PowerShell
WMI is a fantastic management tool that is built right into Windows client and server. With PowerShell, you can access all off WMI simply and easily. This course shows you how you can do that.
UPDATE: This new player has been officially released!
We’ve learned a lot since we shipped our first Android player. Namely that getting videos to play reliably on different devices using Android’s video library is next to impossible due to fragmentation of the implementation.
It’s interesting to look at other companies with way more resources than Pluralsight who are also trying to support video on Android. Check out the comments on the Netflix app, for example. Or the YouTube app. There’s a lot of pain with those apps as well.
If you consider the plethora of devices out there, then add to the mix people who use custom ROMs, and consider the much larger companies who are also struggling with this, it’s not surprising that we’ve not yet satisfied all of our customers with our Android player.
But we’re not giving up. In fact, our dev team is currently writing a whole new video playback engine based on FFmpeg. This is a major undertaking as we must port the FFmpeg library to work on Android, but we’ve had some encouraging breakthroughs.
Once we have something we can share, we’d love to have some of you who have been having trouble with the existing player to try out this new version and give us some early feedback. While I can’t promise anything yet, I believe we are within a few weeks of having something to share. In the meantime, thank you so much for your patience with us.
We are dedicated to making our content available on as many devices as possible now and in the future.
Oliver Sturm has just published a new course: DevExpress CodeRush and Refactor!
This course describes the product package CodeRush and Refactor! by DevExpress. It takes you through features for understanding code, creating new code, refactoring, and all the support functionality offered by this exciting Visual Studio integrated productivity package.
Our website release this week introduced a big change in how our “offline viewing” feature works. You can read more about the changes here.
This shift in direction had the biggest impact on our Annual Plus subscribers. After listening to their initial feedback, we’ve learned that many of our Annual Plus subscribers have been using the video “downloads” to watch courses offline on their laptops (as opposed to a mobile device) while on-the-go. This scenario, unfortunately, is no longer supported after the changes we deployed yesterday.
We still support offline viewing (the feature we advertise) but we’ve changed the user experience and the backend implementation. Instead of using the ‘Downloads’ tab to manually download WMV files for each course module, you can now automatically queue courses for offline viewing within our mobile apps. This works great for most users but we failed to address the laptop scenario outlined above.
We’ve listened to your feedback and have decided to support offline viewing for laptop/desktop users. We’re going to implement a desktop app that will provide offline viewing as soon as possible. This app will allow you to easily queue-up course modules for offline viewing just like you can with our mobile apps.
We’re going to work around the clock to get this desktop app ready for release as soon as possible and hope to have the initial beta out within a few weeks from now.
We value our Annual Plus subscribers and the commitment you’ve made to Pluralsight over the years. We apologize for the inconvenience this may cause you. Thank you for your feedback and your patience with us while working through this.
Today we released some major new features and a new look at pluralsight.com. As part of this release, we’ve fundamentally changed how “offline viewing” works. Now, all Plus subscribers (Monthly Plus & Annual Plus) can take advantage of this feature.
Offline viewing was always meant to enable watching Pluralsight courses on-the-go via one of our supported mobile apps. Before today, Annual Plus subscribers had to manually download course videos from the “Downloads” tab (on each course page) and then figure out how to get them onto their mobile devices.
This approach turned out to be overly complicated and cumbersome for users and it didn’t integrate with our backend user progress and tracking system. We listened to your feedback and have simplified this feature through the offline viewing support now built into our new mobile apps.
From within one of our mobile apps, you can select the course modules you wish to watch offline and our mobile app will take care of caching all the videos onto your device for you. Here’s an example of how it works within our iOS app:
Once you have a course module cached for offline viewing, the user experience will be more like our online experience where you can navigate through the different video clips within the module and skip or repeat sections as needed.
Our mobile apps keep track of what you’ve watched and they’ll send that data back to the server the next time you connect from your device. This makes it possible for you to move between devices and keep track of your progress (see checkmarks below).
For more details on how this feature works, please visit our offline viewing page.
Given this change in direction, we’ve retired the “Downloads” tab and will no longer support downloading entire course modules in a single WMV file (which were always difficult to navigate and manage). You will now find a separate tab dedicated to downloading the “Exercise Files” on each course page (see above).
We believe our new-and-improved offline viewing implementation provides a superior user experience and is the right model for us to invest in long term. It fully integrates with our backend progress and tracking system and is much, much easier to use.
However, this change does require you to have a supported mobile device to take advantage of offline viewing moving forward. We no longer support offline viewing on laptops/desktops, at least for now. We are considering other possibilities for this scenario in the future, but we encourage you to check out our new offline viewing experience via one of our supported mobile devices today. We hope you like it.
If you have any questions or concerns about this change, please don’t hesitate to contact us through our support desk.
Today we released a new website at pluralsight.com that we’re very excited about. It consists of some major new features, a better price for Annual Plus, and an improved user experience (and skin). You can read more about these changes below.
The new features we released today include:
We’ll write more about each of these features over the next several days, but in the meantime, feel free to submit any questions you have via our support desk.
Along with this release, we’ve reduced the price of Annual Plus from $799 down to only $499. At this price, Annual Plus gives you the best possible Pluralsight training experience at a reasonable yearly rate. We’ve also added some new features for Monthly Plus subscribers in this release. The table below describes our plans.
After listening to customer feedback this past year, we decided it was also time for a major website re-skin and some user experience improvements. If you check out the new website, first you’ll notice a new logo with more of an emphasis on video training. We’ve also tried to simplify the site in order to improve navigation.
We’ve enhanced the course library menu to make it easy to browse courses by category, author, most popular, and new releases. We’ve also surfaced some of that navigation in the footer (see image below). Our default course library view is also easier to parse (by category), which simplifies finding courses of interest.
And finally, we’ve introduced Twitter and Facebook integration throughout our course library. Now you can easily share the course you’re watching from any course page or from within the Silverlight player. If you like what you’re watching, give it a try.
We hope you like these improvements! Stay tuned for more detailed information on the new features and please send us your feedback.
Aaron Skonnard
President/CEO, Pluralsight
Kate Gregory has just published a new course: Building Windows 8 Metro Apps with C++ and XAML
With Windows 8 a new application model called Metro was introduced, along with a new runtime called WinRT (Windows RunTime.) In this course you’ll learn the fundamentals of developing Metro apps in C++ using language extensions called C++/CX, XAML, and the WinRT libraries. Leverage the C++ skills you already have and develop Metro apps for Windows 8 with the same libraries as C# or Javascript programmers.
Ian Griffiths has just published a new course: Building Windows 8 Metro Apps in C# and XAML
Windows 8 introduces a new style of application, called ‘Metro’, along with a new API for building this kind of app called ‘WinRT’. This course shows how to use WinRT, in conjunction with XAML, to build Metro applications for Windows 8.
John Sonmez has just published a new course: MonoTouch
We will cover setting up your development environment, creating the application using C# and MonoDevelop, and deploying the finished product. This course is designed to teach you how to use MonoTouch as an alternative to developing iOS applications in Objective-C.
