Monthly Archives: August 2012

Amateur Hour

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What is wrong with the picture? First off, he is blatantly disregarding his own safety and that of anyone who happens to use that doorway. His weight is likely causing imperceptible damage to the hinges and the wood of the door frame. He isn’t using the proper tools for changing hard-to-reach light bulbs.
This is not an expert. An expert has “a prolonged or intense experience through practice and education in a particular field.” This is a guy who pulled off a stunt in which we presume that no one was hurt. Getting away with something once or twice does not make you an expert. It just means you’re lucky.
How may times have we worked with someone who is an “expert” in a technology when all they have really done is pull of some gymnastic shenanigans then walk away unscathed? We should not be falling for this nonsense.

Video: Fake it Until You Make It with FakeItEasy

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FakeItEasy is a .NET framework for easily creating mock objects in tests.  In this video excerpt from Donald Belcham and Jim Cooper’s new course FakeItEasy, you’ll see how easy it is to create a mock object with complex nested hierarchies.  In the full course the duo also covers topics such as AAA syntax, ordered assertions, and strict versus loose mocks.

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New Course: Windows Identity Foundation Patterns: On-Premise and Cloud

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Niraj Bhatt has just published a new course: Windows Identity Foundation Patterns: On-Premise and Cloud

wif-patterns-premise-cloudDealing with multiple identities has always been challenging; even more so with the advent of the cloud. Developers and architects are often confused by the numerous terms, acronyms and buzzwords – such as Active/Passive Federation, SWT, SAML, ADFS, WIF, WS-Trust, WS-Federation, OAuth, OAuth WRAP and others. Niraj begins his course by distilling the technology jargon; setting the foundation for understanding various identity solutions. Having laid the foundation, he then focuses on typical claims-based identity solution patterns within enterprises. Understanding these recurring implementation themes will further simply the mapping of claims-based identity to your LOB applications.

Learning Path: C# – 24 Hours to Becoming a C# Master

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Our library has grown to over 300 courses and almost 1000 hours of content, which means if you spent 8 hours a day watching Pluralsight courses it would take you nearly 6 months to watch the entire library. Of course we wouldn’t stop publishing courses while you watched, so by the time you finished, you’d have another 100+ courses to watch! :)

We realize that picking and choosing the right courses gets more difficult as our library grows, and it is high on our developer team’s priority list this year to implement a new navigation system, one component of which will be “learning paths”. The concept of a learning path is to create a sequenced list of courses that achieves a particular learning objective. For example, you might want to become proficient at building Web sites using ASP.NET MVC. Such a learning path might include courses on C#, .NET, JavaScript, jQuery, and of course ASP.NET MVC. We will have a wide array of recommended learning paths that we define, but we also plan to “crowd source” the process so subscribers can create their own learning paths to use and share with others.

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Meet the Author: James Kovacs on Git Fundamentals

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In the latest episode of our Meet the Author podcast series, Fritz Onion talk to James Kovacs about his course Git Fundamentals.  In the interview James reveals the origins of Git and the background it shares with the founder of Linux. He then describes the differences between a distributed version control system and a centralized version control system such as Subversion or TFS, as well as providing some examples of things you can do with a DVCS that you can’t do with a centralized version.

Listen to the Audio (MP3)

Meet the Author:  James Kovacs on Git Fundamentals

Transcript

[Fritz] Hi. This is Fritz Onion. I’m here today speaking with James Kovacs about his new course, Git Fundamentals. James is a Technical Evangelist for JetBrains. He’s passionate in sharing his knowledge about OO, SOLID, TDD/BDD, testing, object-relational mapping, dependency injection, refactoring, continuous integration, and other technologies related. He blogs at codebetter.com, and is a technical contributor here. He writes articles for MSDN Magazine and CoDe Magazine, and is a frequent speaker at conferences and user groups. He’s also the creator of PSake, a PowerShell-based build automation tool, intended to save developers from XML hell. Thanks for joining me today, James.

[James] Thanks for having me, Fritz.

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Our 300th Course! Watch it FREE for 48 Hours!

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Today we’re excited to announce the release of our 300th course! Celebrate with us and watch John Papa’s Single Page Apps course free for the next 48 hours!

No need to register or provide a credit card!

Learn how to create rich user experiences by building Single Page Applications with HTML5, jQuery, Knockout and the ASP.NET Web API.

Watch free for the next 48 hours!

FREE access ends on Friday, August 31, 2012 at 5pm MDT so watch it now.

Follow @pluralsight on Twitter to find out about other great offers like this, and feel free to Tweet this offer to everyone you know.

New Course: Single Page Apps with HTML5, ASP.NET Web API, Knockout and jQuery

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John Papa has just published a new course: Single Page Apps with HTML5, Web API, Knockout and jQuery

spaSingle Page Applications (SPA’s) focus on delivering rich user experiences with significant client-side interactions using JavaScript, HTML5, and CSS. In this course, John explores how to build end to end SPA solutions using data binding and MVVM on the client, data services for abstracted calls, navigation and routing, responsive design for mobility, and local storage. On the server, you will explore layered patterns, ASP.NET Web API for RESTful services returning JSON, and Entity Framework Code First for data access.

Pluralsight Top 10: Building a Great Software Development Team

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I’ve had the pleasure of hiring a great team of developers here at Pluralsight. In this post, I share the top ten ideas I had in mind for building (and keeping) a great team.

1.  Hire small.

Small teams are generally more efficient than large teams, and they are easier to manage too. Communication is easier with less people on a team (it’s a smaller graph with less edges), and each person will be making more of a contribution, which is great for their morale plus each will connect with more of the code base. As Ron Jeffries wrote, “I’m not afraid to change my own code. And it’s all my own code.”

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Video: Get the Big Picture on Big Data with Hadoop and Azure

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Microsoft is adding more and more cloud services under it’s Azure banner seemingly every day.  Figuring out what these services are and how they might be useful can be a challenge.  David Chappell’s new course Windows Azure: The Big Picture will help you sort out these services and give you ideas about how you can use these services in your applications.  In this video excerpt David shows how the Hadoop service works on Windows Azure and why you might want to use a cloud service to manage big data.

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