The company’s Express editions of products like Visual Studio have been available for several months.
Handing powerful tools to novice developers without a training option left them dependent on other resources to learn how to use them.
It has to be noted Microsoft has a heavy self-interest in training people to do web or Windows development with its Beginner Developer Learning Center.
The tools that someone learns today will be the ones they probably stick with for years.
Microsoft provides a four-step process to getting started Visual Studio Express.
Developers select an interest, web or Windows, and assess their skill level and Lesson Tiers.
They can then download and install the relevant free Express edition they need, and follow a Learning Path of lessons.
From there, the student’s effort and ability takes him forward for the learning experience.
Jason Lee Miller might call this another example of the Google-ization of the Internet.
That might be partially correct, in terms of making a service available online.
Microsoft requires a software installation of an Express product on a machine, one that has a licensed copy of Windows purring away on its hard drive.
The training comes from an online resource, and that speaks to Microsoft’s view of a hybrid online/offline world of resources.
It’s more likely that Microsoft’s training aims for an audience that might be seduced by the LAMP stack of Linux/Apache/MySQL/Perl or PHP or Python, as well as potential Ruby on Rails or Java developers.
Microsoft is making a gamble that free training today will equal commercial licensing sales of Visual Studio, SQL Server, and Windows tomorrow.
On the web development side, Microsoft offers a lot of information for the learner.
They go through Visual Studio Express as a platform, and touch on CSS and JavaScript.
That leads to introductions to Visual Basic and C#.
Once learners move to Tier Two, they start with ASP.NET and begin building a user interface.
Tier Three continues their journey through website development, and includes a lesson on one of the more important aspects of that task: debugging and tracing.
Microsoft isn’t limiting their Beginners to being adults.
They have also provided a Kids Corner of C# and Visual Basic e-books to bring the little ones into Microsoft’s way of development thinking.
Maybe your next web developer won’t have time to work on your e-commerce engine until baseball practice is over.
He’ll have to put your project on hiatus when he discovers girls, though.
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