Jim Christopher has published a new course: Everyday PowerShell for Developers

PowerShell is the biggest philosophy shift to come out of Microsoft so far this millenium. Suddenly, you’re supposed to type at the keyboard again, after all those years of making you click on boxes to get your work done. It’s everywhere – you can’t hope to touch a Microsoft technology without knowing a little PowerShell. That doesn’t mean you need to become an expert. In fact, PowerShell is designed so that you don’t need to know much about it to get your work done. This course aims to get you that sweet spot of PowerShell knowledge – enough to be helpful, and not cause permanent damage – by showing you how PowerShell appies to the things you already do everyday.

What things? Things like these things:

• managing projects and solution environments
•  working with code in Visual Studio
•  fighting with source control
•  managing complex software builds

Who is the course for?

This course is aimed squarely at developers interested in learning PowerShell as they apply it to their day-to-day activities. If you want to start automating the mind-numbing aspects of your work life tomorrow morning, this course is for you.

What will you get for your investment?

This is an applied course, and each module demonstrates how PowerShell can shave minutes or hours off work you’re already doing.

Module 1 provides a quick PowerShell primer, giving you enough of an introduction to digest the rest of the course. Module 2 (Cutting Corners in Windows Explorer) shows you how you can automate things you do in Windows Explorer, such as opening Visual Studio solutions. Module 3 (Using .NET from PowerShell) teaches you to leverage all of your .NET knowledge from the interactive PowerShell console, with a demonstration of using the shell to transform image data into sandbagged HTML markup. In Module 4 (Creating a Rich Mercurial Environment in PowerShell), you learn how to effectively use legacy console applications in PowerShell scripts, as well as how to customize the PowerShell environment for specific tasks such as source control. Module 5 (Expanding PowerShell with Existing Modules) gives you the knowledge you’ll need to use the multitude of third-party PowerShell modules to manage technologies such as SQL Server, IIS, and Sharepoint. Module 6 (Automating Builds with PSake) shows you how to tame your software builds using the PSake PowerShell module, making them fast and extensible without the fuss of Visual Studio. Finally, Module 7 rounds out the course with a look at StudioShell, a powerful automation environment for Visual Studio that allows you to control everything from the Visual Studio menus to the code in your project, right from PowerShell; the demos for this module include a refactoring operation based on complex code criteria, something that simply isn’t possible with the existing tool set in Visual Studio.

Right now is always the best time to begin. Click here to start learning. We hope you enjoy it!

Matt Milner has just published a new course: Windows Azure Web Sites

Windows Azure websites is a new web site hosting solution from Microsoft. The Azure websites hosting solution provides all the scale and reliability of the Azure platform with the ease of deploying to remote IIS server and is open to ASP.NET, Node.js, PHP developers and more. Get your first site with a database created in seconds!

What will you learn?

In this course you will learn how Windows Azure websites enables scaling your application simply and quickly to meet demand and manage costs. You will learn how to publish various types of web applications from Visual Studio, WebMatrix, or FTP and how to use continuous integration with git and Team Foundation Service to automate your deployments. In addition, you will see how to monitor and troubleshoot your web sites and how to quickly create sites with related database or using a template from the gallery to provision a working website in seconds.

Check out the ToC and get started on this course by clicking here. Happy learning!

John Sonmez has just published a new couse: Using ServiceStack to Build APIs

Building web services today can be very confusing. It is not easy to pull together all the different technologies required to build an API or distributed service, because there are so many choices. ServiceStack makes things much simpler by providing a convention based “stack” of service. It allows you to build a clean service based API using standard web service formats and protocols without having to worry about all of the infrastructure needed to provide it. In this course,  you will learn what ServiceStack is and how you can use it as an alternative to ASP.NET MVC, Web API and WCF for quickly building elegant and speedy applications that can run on just about any platform. If you want a simple convention based approach for building services and APIs in .NET and you want it all in one package, you may be intersted in checking out this course.

Click here to get started. Happy learning!

Kenny Kerr has just published a new course: Direct2D Fundamentals

Direct2D is a native, immediate-mode, graphics rendering library that provides uncompromising performance. Its focus is on two-dimensional rendering, providing a rich array of primitives for rendering vector graphics, bitmaps and text. It’s designed to squeeze as much out of the underlying Direct3D-based GPU as humanly possible while retaining a surprisingly enjoyable API surface.

 Who should attend?

Any developers interested in the future of cutting-edge graphics for both games and applications on the various Windows platforms needs to take a close look at Direct2D.

What will you learn?

As its name suggests, Direct2D Fundamentals covers the core rendering facilities of the Direct2D library. You’ll quickly learn everything you need to know in order to start using Direct2D, from window plumbing to COM essentials. Next you’ll learn all about the window render target, brushes, geometries, bitmaps, transforms and text. This course is packed with detailed demonstrations so you’ll see a lot of hands-on coding. There’s no cut-and-paste here. Everything is written by hand and illustrated graphically. You’ll quickly feel right at home with the most powerful 2D graphics API on Windows.

Get started now by clicking here. We hope you enjoy the course!