New Course: Building Windows Store Business Apps with Prism

Brian Noyes has just published a new course: Building Windows Store Business Apps with Prism

building-windows-store-business-applications-prismJust when you thought Pluralsight could not publish any more in a day…Brian has been working hard to get this content ready and just a couple days after the new release of Prism.

When building client business applications for WinRT and the Windows Store in XAML you need to design your application for maintainability and testability. To achieve this, you need to design your application following principles of separation of concerns and loose coupling, which usually means employing the Model-View-ViewModel (MVVM) pattern in XAML. In addition, you have to learn how to leverage the new features of the Windows Runtime (WinRT) platform to ensure a great user experience, but have the code that drives that experience in the right places in your application following the MVVM pattern.

In this course you will learn how to do that by learning how to leverage the Microsoft patterns and practices guidance “Prism for Windows Runtime” directly from a member of the Prism team. You will learn how to separate your Pages into Views and ViewModels following the MVVM pattern and integrate nicely with the WinRT navigation system and application lifecycle of suspend/terminate/resume. You’ll learn how to manage dependencies and communicate between loosely coupled components in your application. You will see how to validate user input, both on the client side and through service calls to a back end, as well as how to display those errors to the user. You learn how to call Web API services and how to do simple authentication and authorization with those services. Finally you will learn how to leverage Windows Runtime platform features including Search charm, Settings charm flyout panels, and Live Tiles.

So sit back and enjoy the weekend with Brian. Click here to get started right away.

New course: AngularJS Fundamentals

Jim Cooper and Joe Eames have just published a new course: AngularJS Fundamentals

In this course you will learn how simple it is to use AngularJS to create maintainable and testable single page applications.

You will learn how to:

  • Bootstrap your AngularJS application
  • Use AngularJS markup and expressions
  • Create and use controllers
  • Use built-in services and create custom services
  • Turn your application into a SPA using routing
  • Create your own custom elements and handle events using directives.
  • You will also learn how AngularJS allows you to do all thing using test-driven-development.

Both Jim and Joe have been creating courses over the past few years, click on their names to learn more about them and the courses they offer.  You can also check out their blogs (Jim, Joe). Get started on this course by clicking here to go directly to the TOC. I hope you enjoy it! Have a great weekend!

New course: Creating Acceptance Tests with FitNesse

Another new course from John Sonmez: Creating Acceptance Tests with FitNesse

Creating acceptance tests can be difficult in software development, because often a developer has to translate business requirements into coded tests. Many times some of what needs to be tested and how it needs to be tested gets lost in the translation. Wouldn’t it be easier if the business person or QA person could just create the test cases themselves and still have them automated? FitNesse is a great testing framework that allows you to do just that. Using FitNesse, a developer creates test fixtures that allow non-technical people to write tests just by modifying a Wiki page.

In this course John walks you through the steps to get set up and running with FitNesse. He’ll show you how to use the older Fit style of creating test and the newer Slim style and we’ll cover both Java and .NET, since FitNesse can work with either platform. FitNesse itself happens to be a Wiki, so it is also an excellent tool for documenting a system and the tests that go with it in a format that changes with the system. So if you’ve been thinking about learning about an acceptance test framework, or you’ve been wanted to learn FitNesse, but have always thought it had a steep learning curve, this course will help you to get started quickly and understand how FitNesse works.

Check out the TOC, and possibly get started on this course before the weekend. Please let us know what you think on twitter or on the discussion forums. I hope you enjoy the course!

New course: Making Java and C# Work Together: JVM and .NET CLR Interop

John Sonmez has just published a new course: Making Java and C# Work Together: JVM and .NET CLR Interop

Are you plagued by the problem of trying to get some Java and C# code to work together? Do you have constant battles between the .NET side and the Java side, because of the competition between the two? Perhaps you just have to work in both environments and wish there was a way to reuse some of your code from Java in .NET or .NET code in Java?

This course will give you solutions to help with all of those problems. In this course you’ll take a look at how you can make your Java and .NET code talk by utilizing 3 different technologies. First, you’ll use IKVM.NET to convert Java directly to .NET, which will allow you to use Java libraries in your .NET applications and even write Java applications in .NET. Then, you’ll use JNBridgePro to bridge directly between .NET and Java and allow you to communicate between .NET and Java applications while still running each in their own environment. Finally, John introduces you to RabbitMQ for creating a message based service that allows for not only Java and .NET to interoperate, but also any other language that can send messages to RabbitMQ.

So, if you’ve been considering rewrite a Java application as a .NET application or a .NET application as a Java application, but have been thinking there has to be a better way, this course might be just what you are looking for. Or if you are in an environment where both Java and .NET are used, but seldom talk to each other, this course can help you to learn about tools you can use to get both sides talking, letting you walk away a hero. Click here to go directly to the TOC. Keep watching… I have another course coming in just a few…

 

 

New course: Continuous Testing with NCrunch

Erik Dietrich has just published his 1st course: Continuous Testing with NCrunch

Continuous testing is a practice that dramatically improves efficiency of unit testing and test driven development. This course provides background on continuous testing and explores the use of a tool called NCrunch to increase development efficiency, provide code coverage information and generally improve the unit testing process. Included are a deep-dive into NCrunch and a TDD demonstration.

We are thrilled to have Erik as our newest published author. He is a software architect, team leader and technologist that enjoys working with a wide variety of programming languages, frameworks and tools. You’ll note after checking out his blog, he is an active blogger with extensive experience teaching and demonstrating software development techniques. Erik is always up for any conversation about technology. Erik’s recent experience has focused on the .NET framework, though over the years he has worked with C++, Java, and a number of other languages. His projects range from low-level driver and kernel module programming all the way up to user interface design and the types of applications run the gamut from home automation to rigorous code analysis to line of business applications. Outside of the software industry, Erik has a wide range of interests including, but not limited to, mathematics, literature, history, philosophy, sciences, home improvement, gardening, cooking, and seeing the world. Keep watching for more courses from Erik.

Click here to go directly to the TOC and start learning. Don’t forget to let us know what you think on twitter (@pluralsight @daedtech @megbruss) or the discussion forums. I hope you enjoy this course!

New course: Ruby on Rails – A Jumpstart for .NET Developers

Dustin Davis has just published: Ruby on Rails – A Jumpstart for .NET Developers

This course is for .NET developers who want to try out Ruby on Rails without investing a significant amount of time into learning both Ruby and the Rails framework. In this course, we walk through what Ruby and Rails are, how they compare to .NET languages like C# and VB. After a brief introduction to the Ruby language, we jump into building a Rails application and customizing it. Go directly to the TOC and get started on this one!

Dustin also has more courses in the library, click here to check them out and to read more about his background. I’ll sound like a broken record but I’ll say it anyway ;) … please let us know what you think about this one on the course forum. Your feedback helps us improve, we appreciate it.

 

 

New course: The Essentials of COM

Kenny Kerr’s latest Pluralsight course is now available: The Essentials of COM

This is the first in a series of courses exploring the essentials of COM and the Windows Runtime. In this first course, you are going to learn everything you need to know to use COM confidently and effectively. This course explores the history of COM. You will learn about how C++ shaped the design of COM. You will learn the essentials of compilation and linking, fundamental to the idea of dynamically linking applications and components together. By the end of this course you will have a thorough understanding of COM’s IUnknown interface, how and why it works the way it does, how to implement it, how to use it, and how to wrap it up in a safe and efficient manner with modern C++ libraries.

Click here to get started on this course. Kenny has more and more courses in the works, keep watching for them! As usual, we would love to get your feedback. Please let us know what you think in the course forum. I hope you enjoy the course!

Pluralsight “New Releases” Newsletter: May 14, 2013

Check out these newly released courses in this week’s newsletter: 

You can also read about Teaching Kids Programming, see trending articles from our blog, and watch free video excerpts.

Read this week’s newsletter today!

You can subscribe to our weekly newsletter to receive future updates like this right to your inbox.

New Course: Understanding SharePoint 2013: Part 4 – Conventional Development

Sahil Malik has just published a new course: Understanding SharePoint 2013: Part 4 – Conventional Development

understanding-sharepoint2013-development-conventionsOn March 5, 2013, Sahil dropped the first 3 courses of this “Understanding SharePoint 2013″ series with the promise of more to come. Well, here he is again with all the style and grace that you have come to expect from him.

SharePoint 2013 supports two main ways of deploying new functionality – WSPs (Windows Solution Packages) and Apps. Apps are new, but WSPs are still good for many key scenarios. This video walks you through the more “SharePointy” topics, and introduces you to authoring WSPs in SharePoint. Having this knowledge is key to understanding Apps.

Go enjoy this new course by clicking here, and don’t get too comfortable because Sahil will have more for you soon enough.

New course: Building a Successful Blog

Pinal Dave has just published a new course: Building a Successful Blog

As a very successful blogger, receiving almost 2 million views every month of his own blog, Pinal Dave seemed just the man to write this course. You can hear his enthusiasm about blogging throughout the entire course, it’s contagious :) In fact, I can quote Pinal in saying this about his course:

“Expressing yourself is the most common behavior of humans. Blogging has made easy to express yourself. Just like a letter or book has a structure and formula, blogging also has structure and formula. In this introductory course on blogging we will go over a few of the basics of blogging and show the way to get started with blogging immediately. If you already have a blog, this course will be even more relevant as this will discuss many of the common questions and issue you face in your blogging routine.”

I’m excited to know what you think about this course. Feel free to tweet to us (@pluralsight, @pinaldave, @megbruss) or let us know what you think on the forum. Pinal has more classes lined up, so keep watching for more of his content. Click here to get started learning. Have a great week!