MVA Course: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications Jump Start (Modules 7 & 8)

Covered deploying to Azure, SignalR, and new features in Visual Studio 2013.

MVA Course: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications Jump Start (Modules 5 & 6)

Covered JavaScript and Web services in these two modules.

MVA Course: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications Jump Start (Modules 3 & 4)

Cover writing controllers and views.  Visual Studio has a lot of tools to help make this very easy. With some practice should be possible to deploy applications very fast with scaffolding and templates and such.

MVA Course: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications Jump Start (Modules 1 & 2)

Basic overview and ASP.NET MVC, with an emphasis on quickly getting into the code. First couple modules were relatively short (30-45 minutes) and easy to follow.

MVA Course: Software Testing with Visual Studio 2012 Jump Start (Modules 4a & 4b)

Manage Test Execution

These modules mostly covered running tests and managing work items.

MVA Course: Software Testing with Visual Studio 2012 Jump Start (Modules 3a & 3b)

Just getting back into this course after focusing on the 70-480 test.  Steve and Anthony cover creating test steps for a test case, creating action recordings, and using parameters. The parameters are pretty cool since they make it simple to execute multiple test runs using different data.  The shared steps were also interesting, seems they would make tests much more maintainable.

MVA Course: Software Testing with Visual Studio 2012 Jump Start (Modules 1 & 2)

Create and Configure test plans

Pretty heavy on the demos, which was a bummer because I don't have Hyper-v to run the VM and I don't have the permissions yet to start creating a bunch of stuff locally. Eh, here's my notes:

MVA Course: Applying ALM with Visual Studio 2012 Jump Start (Modules 6 & 7)

Well that is a wrap on Applying ALM. Good course overall, a high level overview of a lot of these concepts. I think I would have benefited from taking this course BEFORE I took the admin course...

MVA Course: Applying ALM with Visual Studio 2012 Jump Start (Modules 4 & 5)

Notes for this course:

MVA Course: Applying ALM with Visual Studio 2012 Jump Start (Modules 2 & 3)

Module 1 was an exam overview/introduction, so I skipped taking any notes on it. Here are the notes on modules 2 and 3:

MVA Course: Administering TFS 2012 Jump Start (Modules 4 & 5)

Customize TFS for Team Use, and Administer Version Control

Another certificate of completion:

MVA Course: Administering TFS 2012 Jump Start (Modules 3a & 3b)

Managing Team Foundation Server

These two modules cover managing collections, backup and recovery, lab management, and security.

Below are my notes, which again are basically just the text from the slides with added annotations:

MVA Course: Administering TFS 2012 Jump Start (Modules 1 & 2)

Install and Configure Team Foundation Server

The first two modules of this course cover installing and configuring TFS. It covers installation prerequisites, including OS and SQL Server requirements. They talk about how services should be configured. I took plenty of notes, the bulk of which are verbatim off the slides (which works because they did a lot of reading right off the slides.

MVA Course Advanced Windows Store App Development with HTML5 Jump Start Part 3

This is the last two modules of this MVA course. I didn't take notes as copious as I did with Module 4 so I figured it wouldn't be a big deal to combine them.  The certificate of completion is pretty farcical for this course considering there wasn't a single test. I actually showed 100% progress before I even watched the third lecture. Oh well...

MVA Course Advanced Windows Store App Development with HTML5 Jump Start Part 2

I finally figured out that I would be able to take much more meaningful notes if I took them as I watched the lectures, much as I do with the MIT OCW stuff. As a result the notes for Module 4 of this class are much long and I felt they deserved their own post.  About half the module was spent on promises, I'm not sure they meant to go so long on it but the second half of the lecture was much quicker.

Here is the note dump:

MVA Course Advanced Windows Store App Development with HTML5 Jump Start Part 1

I worked through the first three modules of this course, which is focused on certain features of developing Windows 8 apps.  These features aren't all necessarily Windows 8 specific, but that was the focus of the course so far.

MVA Course "Developing in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 Jump Start"

This is the first time I've worked through one of the courses offered by Microsoft Virtual Academy. In the interest of targeting my efforts toward the specific job I want, I've decided to go after the MCSD: Web Applications certification, which consists of three tests: 70-480 "Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3", 70-486 "Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications", and 70-487 "Developing Windows Azure and Web Services". This first course is targeted at 480, and is a pretty basic overview of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript, though I did learn a couple new things. The last module dealt with "Promises" which was a completely new concept for me. I'd seen asynchronous functionality in JavaScript before but this was a pretty interesting new take on it, definitely worth some additional follow up. Overall it was a pretty easy 6ish hour course.