Stacia Misner has just published a new course: Advanced Analysis Services

This course covers advanced design topics related to dimensions and partitions. In it, Stacia explains how to utilize Analysis Services features for parent-child hierarchies, financial analytics, referenced dimensions and many-to-many relationships. She also demonstrates how to work with write back in Analysis Services for both dimensions and cells. In addition, this course provides guidance for managing Analysis Services performance and storage through the implementation of aggregations and partitions. Furthermore, this course expands topics introduced in the Analysis Services Fundamentals course by explaining how to manage design and data changes following initial implementation and how to implement alternative security scenarios. The features and demonstrations in this course focus on the SQL Server 2008 R2 release, although most topics also apply to all versions of Analysis Services (SQL Server 2005 and later).

John Sonmez has just published a new course: Introduction to 2D Game Programming with XNA

Game programming doesn’t have to be difficult. If you’ve wanted to learn how to program simple games for Xbox, Windows or Windows Phone 7, but have been intimidated by the complexity, this course is for you! John walks you through using the Microsoft XNA framework to build a simple 2D space shooting game, exploring numerous game programming concepts along the way. Topics explored include: creating and using 2D graphics, accepting input from keyboards, mice, game controllers and touch screens, working with sounds and animation and much more. The course concludes by demonstrating how to deploy the game to a real Xbox 360 console and various application marketplaces.

Steve Evans has just published an update to his popular course: IIS for Developers 

His latest update explores several new and enhanced features available in IIS 8, including Application Initialization (site warm up), SNI (Server Name Indication) and other SSL improvements, CPU throttling and support for Web Sockets. Click here to go straight to his course and check it out the update. Happy learning!

Marcel de Vries has just published a new course: IntelliTrace

IntelliTrace is a feature of Visual studio Ultimate that enables application debugging using a historical execution log. In this course, Marcel explores how to use IntelliTrace to enhance interactive debugging sessions, as well as how to leverage it as a postmortem debugger in testing environments (using the Microsoft Test Manager) and on production systems. He also explores in depth several advanced topics such as CLR profiler integration and collection plan tuning.