Just Finished Teaching .NET 2.0 Foundations

MCPWannabe

Oh my god... wow.. I just finished delivering 483 pages of content in 3 days for foundations 2.0... Some impressions:

The people in my class were all experienced programmers with at least 3 years of experience. We started out covering Generics and the .NET 2.0 Interfaces. We then rushed through building assemblies, debugging, event Logging, filestreams, and Serialization.

By the end of the course, I was tired. The students were tired, and everyone was just kind of barely making it. But we got to discuss some really cool implementations of our material --
creating document automation programs, building compatibility between Linux, IBM, and .NET, and improving database functionality.

The students busted their butts. I really admired their work ethic to try and master so many concepts in just 3 days. All of them had computer related bachelor degrees but this went far beyond that level of knowledge.

In the end, I came away quite impressed from this experience. Right now, I have a headache but I hear that sort of comes with the territory when you teach your first programming class.

JDMurray

This was a bootcamp for 70-536?

MCPWannabe

JDMurray wrote:

This was a bootcamp for 70-536?

JD, it should have been a bootcamp, but it is actually Microsoft's Official Course Curriculum. I coudn't believe it. And here is the funny thing about all of that. The 483 pages only covered half of the material for that exam. We are doing one more 3 day 500 page course that deals with advanced .NET foundations. The combination of both of those courses is supposed to prepare one for the test.. Good lord..

JDMurray

Wow! I've taken MOC classes at a community college, but they were six hours per week over 14 weeks. No offense, but I'm glad that I'm not relying on your classes to pass a MS cert exam. I'd never survive it!

skrpune

YOWZA, that sounds absolutely brutal, both for teacher & students!!

So is this course geared towards people who already have the knowledge & just need to learn the certification slant of the subject matter? I think my head would pop if I tried to run through nearly 1000 pages of materials in two weeks time...

MCPWannabe

@JD -- you are right. It was hell. Microsoft only does that for a few of their MOCS, but that is one of them. I spent all day in Bed yesterday recovering. I didn't realize that it took so much out of me to teach that course. By I slept 3 hours a night revising those lessons for the course. The course was only for 72 hours but it was tough. I don't think that the students will be ready for the certification. It was too much information for that amount of time. But I do believe that the students will be able to get the certification a lot faster as they've now covered eveyrthing and done all the labs. Now, the review process will need to kick in and fill in the missing info.

Skrprune, yeah the course was geared towards experienced programmers. Microsoft offers some intro courses over the .NET framework: the 4994 and 4995 series are more for learning how to use vb or Csharp in .NET for a beginner. But this one was full-speed.