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Alan:
When you’re talking about Microsoft
programming, you’re talking about Visual Studio 2010. And Visual Studio
2010 is not just one application you have to learn – it’s a whole suite of
programs and you have to learn all of them.
What better way to learn Visual
Studio 2010 than from the experts?
Our guests today are Craig Jensen, CEO and
President of AppDev and Robert Green, AppDev courseware author and
presenter of Visual Studio 2010.
Welcome to Let’s Talk Computers, guys.
Craig:
Thanks for having us, Alan.
Alan:
Craig, when you’re talking about Visual
Studio, it’s not just one application anymore.
There are so many parts to this puzzle that
you really don’t even know where to get started.
From the average developer, you need a road
map!
This is where you really need the expert training
that AppDev provides.
Craig:
AppDev is in the business of helping
developers learn practical ways to utilize the programming languages to
help them to build more effective applications.
We can do that through a library of products
that we have that takes you through any of the technologies that you’re
going to need to know.
Alan:
Well, why should I have to learn Visual
Studio 2010?
What are the benefits for this?
Craig:
At AppDev, we’ve been involved in
learning products that go all the way back to the early days of Microsoft
languages.
Robert can walk through a little bit about
what the benefits of 2010 would be for the developers.
Robert:
The approach I’ve always taken is to
remember that Visual Studio is a developer tool.
Basically, it’s a developer tool kit.
Say you decide you’re going to now
get into home repair. You’re tired of hiring people to do home
repair so you ask me, “What tools do I need?”
I
come over and I drop off a big box of tools for you and I tell you that
there’s everything you need.
And then you open it up and there’s
all kinds of things in there...there are hammers and saws, there are some
things you’re familiar with that you pretty much know how to use.
Then there are tools that you’ve never seen
before and you say, “What is this?”
And then I tell you, “Well, it can help you do
this.”
And now you’ve got a number of questions.
What is this saying?
What can I do with it?
How can I get started using this?
That’s the approach we take when we
create courseware. Visual Studio 2010 gives you the ability to
write rich Web applications, rich desktop applications, mobile
applications, SharePoint applications and there are tools for doing
Workflow and Services, where computers can talk to other computers and a
whole bunch of things.
You don’t need to learn them all,
but if you’re building an application you look at Visual Studio and think,
“What tools are in here that I can use to build the kind of application I
want to build?
How do I get started using them?”
That’s where the courseware comes in.
Visual Studio 2010 makes it much
easier to build SharePoint applications.
It makes it easier to build rich desktop
applications or rich Web applications.
There are enhancements to Visual Basic and C#
language that makes it easier for you to write code; it makes you be able
to write more advanced code.
So the benefits are that it’s a better set of
tools for building the types of applications that developers want to
build.
Alan:
As a developer myself, one of the things
that I try to do is work with the client to figure out what the client
wants and not so much to get caught up in the tools themselves – because
if you have to stop and think about how to use each one of these tools
you’re wasting a whole lot of time and developers don’t have that time.
They need to have step-by-step ways
of going through a process of what they need to know next.
This is where your courseware really shines,
isn’t it?
Robert:
Absolutely!
If a customer comes to you and says they want
to build an application to manage their customers, you could build it as a
desktop application using Windows Forms or Windows Presentation Foundation
or you could build it as a Web application using Siverlight or ASP.NET.
You could build it as Outlook Application and
use the Visual Studio tools for Office, or you could build it as a
SharePoint application if the users are sitting in SharePoint all day
long.
So the first you would say is,
“What are your users used to?
Do we need to build this as a desktop or
SharePoint Web application?”
And then at that point, you’d go to Visual
Studio (one place) and you’d say, “I’m going to build this as a SharePoint
app. Oh, good!
There’s a new SharePoint tool in Visual
Studio.”
Visual Studio 2010 now makes it easy to build this as
a SharePoint application or as a desktop
application.
We might also choose Windows
Presentation Foundation because we’re sort of familiar with building
desktop applications and now with WPF we can build much better looking and
more powerful applications.
I always start from the need and then you find
in Visual Studio what tool or set of tools you need to build the
application.
Alan:
Let’s start off with Visual Basic 2010.
This isn’t like your original Visual Basic.
You have so many different directions to go,
and then of course you’ve the .NET Framework, which really confuses a
lot of people.
How do you help us with that?
Craig:
We have courseware.
We teach you how to use Visual Basic to do
common programming tasks.
They, in kind, not only learn the .NET side of
it, but also how to use the Framework to talk to data or read XML or
respond to the user taking an action.
We talk about the new features that are in
Visual Basic. Visual Basic in 2010 is more powerful; it’s
kind of a catch up release. C# traditionally gets more powerful features
first and then Visual Basic catches up.
With Visual Studio 2010, Microsoft
has started on a different approach where they are essentially going to
make the languages equally powerful and then keep them that way moving
forward.
So, there’s a lot of new power in Visual Basic that
makes it the equal of C# now.
Alan:
One of the problems that I see as a
developer trying to learn a new set of languages (and this is what we’re
really doing), is the time involved.
I can go to school and learn all this, but my
employer doesn’t really like sending me off.
I need to learn when I am available to learn.
Your courses are set up that way where I can
start - stop- start- stop any time I want to, isn’t it?
Craig:
Our courses will give you a number of opportunities.
One is that you can go to our library and look at the exploring
course and see what’s new in Visual Studio 2010 and then identify where
you want to go from there.
In the past years we always had our
courses on a product-by-product basis.
What we have done now is to create a Microsoft
Learning Library so that someone can subscribe to that library, pay one
small fee up front and get everything for the next year within that
library.
Right now, our Microsoft Learning
Library is a little over 100 courses.
And then any of our new Microsoft courses that
we have that come out new you will get that free. So it really gives you
that full set of courseware that you are going to need and media that you
can utilize to watch somebody build applications.
So, whether you’re an auditory
learner, whether you learn by doing or learn by watching...you can do all
of those with our content. Where you want to look at it, where you want to
learn, and when you want to learn it.
Alan:
Gone are the days where you just do
desktop applications anymore.
If you get started doing a desktop application
somebody is going to demand, “Well, we need to move it to the Web.”
And now you have to look at
AJAX
and all of its implications.
This is something that, “Well, I didn’t start
off with learning it right off the bat,” but now I can just pick it up and
go on with it, can’t I?
Craig:
Within our Microsoft Learning Library we
have topics that relate to building desktop applications and also building
applications on the Web. You have all the resources that you need both to
learn it and also to use as reference material going forward.
Alan:
Robert, you’re one of the AppDev
presenters.
How do you present your courseware?
What is a typical person who’s going to be
taking your course?
Robert:
The typical person who is going to be
taking my course would be somebody who has done development, so they’re an
experienced developer and interested in learning new technologies.
The perfect example is Silverlight, which is
right now one of the big buzzes.
Silverlight is a way to build
richer, more powerful Web-based applications that use a programming model,
but you would use to build desktop applications.
Rather than learning an
entirely new way of building applications to go to the Web with ASP.NET
and AJAX,
I think one of the benefits of Silverlight is it feels a little bit more
like what you’re used to.
So you say, “Oh, I need to learn
that,” and then you have questions like what is this?
What is Silverlight?
What is this ‘XAML’ that it’s based on,
“extensible application markup language,” which is basically XML that
tells the graphics engine how to draw the pages and windows that you
build.
What code do I write to do things like talk to data
and do validation?
And how do I get start using this?
Somebody would come and take a
Silverlight course and at the end of the course they get to the point
where they go, “Oh, I can do that.
That’s just writing code.” And then they go
and build applications.
Alan:
When I learn a new language or new
application I always like to learn from the experts (the ones that have
been in the trenches) – not the “talking heads” that you see a lot of
times.
I’m putting all my faith in you that you are going to
teach me the right way to do stuff and if you don’t teach me the right way
then I’m lost, aren’t I?
Robert:
Exactly.
If you think about it, every new technology
that comes along is just a new way of doing the same old thing.
“I need you to write me an app that manages my
customers.”
I’ve been writing apps that manage customers
for a lot longer than I care to admit.
I’ve used Access and FoxPro and Visual Basic
and .NET and Visual Basic .NET and C# and on and on and on.
Customer needs have evolved.
They haven’t completely dramatically changed.
So when a customer comes to you and says,
“Build me this application” or your IT Department says, “Build this
application and by the way, use Silverlight.” You know how to build an
application, so what you’re really looking to learn is which tools in
Silverlight will help you build the application.
We approach it from that sense.
You’re not building an entirely new class of
applications.
You know how to build applications; you know
what your customers want.
Here’s how you use a new tool to do that – you
make it very familiar and at that point once you understand the basics of
how you build and application with Silverlight, you know how to build a
customer management or an order management or customer tracking
application.
That isn’t new.
What’s new is how you do that
in Silverlight or in
AJAX or in
Windows Presentation Foundation.
Alan:
Well one of the things that I really enjoy
about the AppDev training is the lab sessions.
These are sessions that I can take back and
use any time I want in my actual code can’t I?
Robert:
When we write courseware we make it very,
very practical.
At the end of the day it is all about the
code.
You are going to go home and write code.
The more time you spend seeing code we’ve
written and then writing code yourself, the more familiar and comfortable
it gets.
Alan:
You present this in so many different
ways.
We have the Online Learning; we also have the
KSource.
What are the other ways that we can learn?
Craig:
People do learn in many different ways.
What we’ve done over time is to build learning
products that will help someone to write practical applications and they
can learn that in a number of different ways.
One would be CD and DVD-ROM.
People can buy the course on CD and DVD. They
can also buy our Microsoft Learning Library, a subscription where they get
everything within the Microsoft Learning Library for one fee.
The beauty of that is there is everything from
the courseware on a .pdf
file to the media, where you watch experts
like Robert Green and Ken Getz actually showing you how put together an
application.
There are also pre and post tests.
You also receive membership into
the AppDev Edge, which is a site where if you have questions you can post
the questions.
We have free training there and many other
services for the customer.
Alan:
If somebody would like to find out more
information about this course and all the other courses that you have
available for AppDev, where would they go?
Craig:
There are a couple of places you can go
to.
One is to call a Learning Consultant by dialing
800-578-2062 and a Learning Consultant can help you identify what your
needs are and how we can help you.
The other thing is to go to our
Website by going to
http://www.appdev.com and take a
look at our material that we have there.
Alan:
Craig and Robert, as always, it’s our
pleasure to have you here as our guests on Let’s Talk Computers, talking
about the wonderful training that we can get through AppDev.
I look forward to talking to you again about
your next Courseware.
Craig:
Thank you, Alan.
Robert:
Thanks for having us.
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