Prepare an Optimal Learning Environment

Prepare for the class by making sure that your workstation meets the minimum requirements, have a stable internet connection, a speakerphone or headset, and check for any firewall issues. By double checking everything before class starts you make the morning of class stress free.

Pre-Class Checklist:

• Wired High Speed Internet
• Phone line with a speakerphone or headset
• Firewall Check at www.gotomypc.com/wizard

When you’re setting up your learning environment, make sure you have an interruption free atmosphere so that you can focus on the class. It is easy to get distracted and miss important information.

Also, it is also helpful to have two computers or monitors to separately view the instructor presentation and remote into the hands-on lab environment.

Speak Up!

Every class starts with introductions. Take this opportunity to get to know your instructor, classmates, and to share about yourself as well as how your company is planning to use the technology. The more information the instructor has about your goals and expectations the better they can tailor the class to your needs.

During class, we highly encourage you to ask questions and participate in classroom discussion. The instructor presentation is only part of the training experience, a lot of the best learning happens organically through class participation. Don’t be shy! The instructors want to hear your questions and comments. It makes for a more exciting and interesting class for everyone.

If you have a question that may not be applicable to the entire class, the instructor may suggest that you take the conversation offline. Either way, we want to make sure you walk away with your questions answered.

Give Feedback

Don’t be afraid to give feedback throughout the week. If class is moving too fast or slow, you’re struggling with a lab, or experiencing technical difficulties, let us know right away. Please don’t wait until the end of week evaluations to let us know about any concerns. Most of these problems have an easy fix, the sooner we know the sooner we can get you back on track.

• http://www.quicklearn.com/contact.aspx

Connect with your Classmates and Instructors.

You can find most of our trainers and staff on LinkedIn or Facebook! We love to connect with our students and see how things go after training. If you had a great trainer, post your reviews or comments on our community to let other people know. On QuickLearn’s Facebook and LinkedIn pages, we share industry news, technical expertise, as well as special deals and events. We also encourage you to connect with your peers. You never know when those networks will come in handy!

• http://www.facebook.com/QuickLearn
• http://www.linkedin.com/company/quicklearn

Have Fun!

The most important thing is to relax and have fun. Our instructors are so passionate about technology and want to share that excitement with you. Encourage them by laughing at their jokes and throwing out a few of your own.

The QuickLearn team looks forward to having you in class. If there is anything that we can do to make your experience more enjoyable, please let us know!

You will not run into your typical Hello World walkthrough with QuickLearn’s new SharePoint 2010 courseware. QuickLearn’s SharePoint 2010 curriculum are scenario-driven classes in which we set out to create real-life SharePoint solutions, dissect them and provide best practice solutions to real problems developers face. Our classes have greater focus on interesting issues such as:

• Developing solutions that can be easily migrated into different environments and packaged for automatic deployment
• Creating code in a secure fashion while working within the limitations of SharePoint’s sandbox solution model, writing client-side object model code that reduces external calls, batches operations, and attempts to reduce request size
• Accessing custom external data sources that aren’t readily accessible with out of the box tooling

Our courses cover each topic in a broader way by providing more in depth labs. Rather than dozens of 10-15 minute labs our 45-60 minute labs provide a more complete picture of each topic.

We show you how to exercise SharePoint’s strengths, as well as work through some of its more challenging areas. Our classes won’t give you a simplified sales pitch that leaves you wanting more, but instead will provide real guidance, for real solutions.

• SharePoint 2010 Developer Immersion
  • Upcoming dates include: February 13-17 & April 16-20
• SharePoint 2010 Developer Deep Dive
  • Upcoming dates include: March 19-23 & May 21-25

For 20% off register before January 20th with the promotion code: NEWSP.

2012 is off to a great start for QuickLearn’s lead ALM instructor, Anthony Borton. Anthony has been awarded the Microsoft® MVP Award for Visual Studio ALM for the 6^th consecutive year. This award is given to exceptional technical community leaders who actively share their high quality, real world expertise with others.

Anthony has developed our leading ALM curriculum that focuses on everything connected to Microsoft Team Foundation Server. He is a popular and highly regarded instructor and international presenter. If you’re eager to learn how to developer software better, please check out our upcoming TFS ALM courses starting again in February.

For those of you eagerly awaiting the upcoming BETA release of the next version of Visual Studio and TFS, make sure you keep an eye out for news of our upcoming early-adopter courses which Anthony is putting the finishing touches on right now. Why not follow us on Facebook or LinkedIn to make sure you don’t miss our announcement.

Happy New Year to all our readers and I hope you’re year has started with some great news as well.

On December 12th, QuickLearn is running a 5-day Visual Studio TFS 2010 course to quickly get development teams up and running.

This class is designed for individuals or complete development teams who need to learn how to use Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate and TFS 2010 for agile software development. This course is broken up into five units: project management, agile team development, test management strategies, and TFS systems administration.

Visit our website for more details and to register.

At course completion, students will be able to:

• Install & configure TFS 2010 and its prerequisite components
• Create, configure and manage Team Projects
• Create and customise Work Item Queries to find and organise work
• Use the version control system effectively including branching
• Install and configure a build environment including build controllers and agents
• Create and manage test plans, test suites and test configurations
• Create and maintain coded UI tests
• View the built-in reports available in TFS 2010

The class is taught by ALM MVP Anthony Borton in Redmond, WA and is available remotely from your home or office. Anthony Borton is a Microsoft Visual Studio ALM MVP and is QuickLearn's Visual Studio ALM technologist and trainer. Has has been an MCP and MCT for more than 15 years and has completed over 50 exams including MS exam 001. He is a Professional Scrum Developer Trainer and has been a Certified ScrumMaster for a number of years.

Quotes from recent Visual Studio TFS students:

“My entire training experience was wonderful and unforgettable. Thank you QuickLearn!!” – Alan H.

“Of all the in-house courses and instructors we have had, Mr. Anthony Borton is the best instructor we have had. He was very knowledgeable on the subject matter.” – David B.

“It was a great class with a large amount of information that was covered in a very effectively manner. It surpassed my expectations!” – Christopher M.

Visit our website for more details and to register.

QuickLearn’s MVP Anthony Borton is scheduled to teach the pre-conference hands-on workshop Managing your Application Lifecycle with TFS at next week’s ALM Summit.

Audience

This pre-conference workshop has been developed as a level 200 event to help get conference attendees up to speed with TFS and maximize their understanding of the product and its features prior to the ALM Summit kicking off.

Course Abstract

Many organizations use only part of what Microsoft Team Foundation Server (TFS) has to offer and as a result are not realizing the full range of benefits available to them. This workshop will give you a hands-on walk through of the many ways TFS can help your team realise more frequent successes with software development projects.
The workshop will start by evaluating and selecting a suitable process template for the project. We’ll work through an end to end project and examine the many capabilities of TFS that can help you start your project off on the right track and keep it there. Some of the key topics we’ll look at include:

• Ensuring effective team communication
• Configuring version control and enabling release management through branching
• Maintaining quality across all parts of the project
• Creating automated builds and seeing how we can customize the build process
• Leveraging the out of the box reports and creating ad-hoc reports

About Anthony Borton

Anthony has designed and developer all of QuickLearn’s ALM curriculum. Anthony is a Microsoft Visual Studio ALM MVP with over 20 years’ experience in the software development and training industries. Anthony is a sought after trainer and has delivered technical training and consulting in the United States and all across the Asia Pacific region. He is a Microsoft MVP (Visual Studio ALM), a Professional Scrum Developer Trainer and a Microsoft Certified Trainer.

View all of Anthony’s upcoming training courses at QuickLearn: http://www.quicklearn.com/tfs-training.aspx