One more nugget of training goodness I forgot to mention in my last post: the Channel 9 Learning Center. This is a resource on Channel 9 that plays host to free technical training materials, content, videos, hands-on labs, and code samples. It will focus on new and emerging technologies with an eye towards helping you quickly ramp your skills with those new products and technologies.

Visual Studio 2010
Germaine to my previous post is the .NET Framework v4 and Visual Studio 2010 Training Course. This course includes videos and hands-on-labs designed to help you learn about some of the new features in Visual Studio 2010 as well as several .NET Framework v4 technologies, such as C# 4.0, Visual Basic 10, F#, Parallel Computing, WCF, WF, WPF, ASP.NET AJAX 4.0, ASP.NET MVC Dynamic Data, Team System and more. Wow, that was an alphabet soup of technologies!

By my count there are eight units in the course, covering all of the above alphabet soup of tech. And, in the interest of full disclosure, those training resources are related to .NET Framework v4 and Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Consider the prerequisite disclaimer appropriately included.

Windows 7
As a special bonus added to this post (specifically about Visual Studio 2010, but I had to throw in a little something extra), there’s also a Windows 7 Training Course. Just like the Visual Studio 2010 course, this course will help you learn how to leverage the new features of Windows 7 as you develop client-based applications. You’ll learn how to take advantage of multi-touch, the new taskbar, sensor and location APIs, the new Windows 7 Ribbon control, enhancements to the shell libraries, instrumentation and performance capabilities, and a boatload more.

Again, seeing as how I learned to count two paragraphs ago, by that counting I see there are thirteen units in the course. Likewise, in the interest of sharing the disclaimer so no one is surprised, this course requires a few more prerequisites: Windows 7, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, Windows 7 SDK, Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework, Windows 7 Multitouch .NET Interop Sample Library, and (optionally) Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2 (or higher).

The two coolest requirements of that bunch are the Windows API Code Pack for the .NET Framework and the Windows 7 Multitouch .NET Interop Sample Library (and especially the API Code Pack). If you had a chance to attend any of our New Efficiency Launch events, you saw some of those capabilities in action. Very easy to build in touch and other Windows 7 features into your .NET application.

Free! It’s all Free!
Did I mention all of this is free? Yes, yes I did. (Thank you Phineas and Ferb…)