Ask a Trainer: Free resources to help you learn SharePoint

FAST university has free webcasts on Enterprise Search and other SharePoint topics

At the MCT Summit in October, I had a chance to chat with Larry Kaye, a Microsoft Certified Trainer. Larry works with FAST University. I hadn’t heard of that organization before, so I asked Larry to fill me in on what they do. I’ll summarize the key offerings here, but if you don’t feel like reading, just watch my interview with Larry below (apologies for the camera shake, I am prone to that, I think I should get a tripod)

FAST University offers training and resources on SharePoint for administrators and developers. Although they cover other topics as well, they offer a lot of training on search features. They have classroom training, and just in case there are no classroom dates or locations convenient for you, they also offer virtual and e-learning courses.

If you register at their website, you can see a full list of the resources, and access a number of free webcasts! Including the following which I thought might be of interest to SharePoint developers:

• Architecture of Search in SharePoint 2010 – learn the architecture of search in Microsoft SharePoint 2010 and FAST Search Server 2010 for SharePoint.
• Business Connectivity Services – Creating a .NET Connectivity Assembly in Visual Studio – learn how to connect SharePoint to external data sources such as SQL Server databases, SAP applications and Web services.
• FAST Search for SharePoint 2010 – Property Extraction – Learn about the property extraction feature that identifies information such as person names, company names, and geographic names and locations in documents. These properties help you find the “who”, “what”,”when”, and “where” of each document.
• Fast Search Server for Internet Sites (FSIS) with Content Transformation Services (CTS) – Learn about Content Transformation Services, how to build flows and sub-flows and tips and techniques for building flows in Visual Studio.
• Search Reporting and Analytics with FAST Search Server – An introduction to Search Reporting and the Search administration tools.

Here’s Larry talking about FAST University and their courses.

This blog is also posted on the Canadian Solution Developer

Free Training on .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010 on YOUR schedule

The Visual Studio Team has released a new Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Course. You can complete it online, or if you prefer you can download the training kit and work offline. For those who don’t have the training budget to take an in person course, these training kits are a fantastic resource! This course is designed for people who have already been playing with .NET but want to get up and running with the new features in .NET 4 and Visual Studio 2010.

The course includes presentations, hands-on labs, and demos. Whether you develop on windows or web, with VB or C#, there is material here to interest you. You will get a chance to look at C# 4, Parallel Extensions, Silverlight 4, ASP.NET 4, enhancements to the data platform, WCF, and Workflow updates, the Application Lifecycle Management tools in Visual Studio, Windows Azure, and more!

You do need Visual Studio 2010 in order to complete the labs. If you don’t have it yet you can download a full trial version.

Since we are in the planning stages for TechDays Canada 2011, I thought I would use TechDays as the inspiration for this week’s My 5.

5 Great Sessions from TechDays 2010 you can watch to learn more about .NET Framework 4 and Visual Studio 2010

1. Getting Your Return on Investment with Microsoft .NET Framework 4 – this is an overview session of the new features in .NET Framework 4 across the different technologies
2. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Tips and Tricks – For anyone who works with Visual Studio, pick up a few tricks to impress your boss and co-workers.
3. New IDE and Language Features in Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 Using Visual Basic and C# – this session is focused on the new features in the programming languages themselves.
4. Web Load Testing with Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 – Learn how to use VS2010 to make it easier to do your web load testing
5. Microsoft Visual Studio 2010 for Web Development – improve your web deployment process

This post is also available on the Canadian Solution Developer blog.