Training, Training, Training, and oh my all Free!

You just got to love a launch year and all of the new products that have come out – Visual Studio 2010, Silverlight 4, Office 2010, SharePoint 2010, SQL Server 2008 R2, Master Data Services, Azure, PowerPivot, and more to come like Parallel Data Warehouse, Windows 7 Mobile, etc.  Now this can be very overwhelming, but with new products brings new opportunities along with some outstanding productivity gains.  So how can you get up-to-speed or exposed to all of these new offerings?  Well there is just a ton of new content and resources readily available to download and use online to get you started and trained on these new products.  This is a great way to expand your portfolio of products and prepare you for these new releases to see how you can benefit from them and incorporate them into your organizations.

Here is just a few possibilities for you to explore, to get your learning on, and extend your portfolio:

• Visual Studio 2010 Resource Kit – provides a deep offering of online and offline content. You have direct access to the most up-to-date training kits for Visual Studio 2010 and the .NET Framework 4, SharePoint 2010, Microsoft Office 2010 and many more. Inside you’ll also find resources including the Visual Studio 2010 Reviewer’s Guide and other valuable content. Explore the Visual Studio 2010 environment through the Hands on Labs and get started to unleash your creativity.
• Moving to Visual Studio 2010 e-Book – The book is not a language primer, a language reference, or a single technology book. It’s a book that will help  professional developers move from previous versions of Visual Studio (starting with 2003 and on up). It will cover the features of Visual Studio 2010 through an application. It will go through a lot of the exciting new language features and new versions of the most popular technologies without putting the emphasis on the technologies themselves. It will instead put the emphasis on how you would get to those new tools and features from Visual Studio 2010.
• Silverlight 4 Training – Course includes a whitepaper explaining all of the new Silverlight 4 features, several hands-on-labs that explain the features, and a 8 unit course for building business applications with Silverlight 4. The business applications course includes 8 modules with extensive hands on labs as well as 25 accompanying videos that walk you through key aspects of building a business application with Silverlight. Key aspects in this course are working with numerous sandboxed and elevated out of browser features, the new RichTextBox control, implicit styling, webcam, drag and drop, multi touch, validation, authentication, MEF, WCF RIA Services, right mouse click, and much more!
• Office 2010 Training Course – includes videos, presentations, hands-on labs and source code. This content is designed to help you get started developing solutions, from Add-ins to full featured Office Business Applications (OBAs), using Visual Studio 2010 with Office 2010 and SharePoint 2010 as the core platform.
• SharePoint 2010 Advanced Developer Training – offers technical training as self-paced modules and hosted labs for SharePoint 2007 professionals who want to upgrade their skills to SharePoint 2010.
• SQL Server 2008 R2 Labs – Try out one, two, or all seven of the virtual labs available in the hosted trial environment and don’t forget the free eLearning that is available – Free Microsoft eLearning SQL 2008 R2 and Azure Training along with SQL Server 2008 R2 Update for Developers Training Kit (new one should be available for RTM soon).
• PowerPivot – Microsoft Virtual Lab: PowerPivot for Excel 2010 Introduction and DAX for PowerPivot Whitepaper

This is just a small sample of what is available out there for you to consume.  As new content is available I continue to tweet about it, so if you are looking for more immediate content and information get your twitter going and expand your resource pool.  I also post tons of content in regards to free online training, events, and other download content on my blog, so explore around and check out the training and downloads categories.  If any of these new technologies interest you at all or you are trying to increase your value, the sky is the limit and the price is definitely right…free, so you can’t complain, just need more time in the day.

Cheers!