Back in the Fall, my team and I held several training events around Windows Phone 7. It was an opportunity to bring developers together to learn the facets of creating great Windows Phone 7 applications. We’ve done these sort of events in the past. However, with the sure volume of upcoming technologies coming out of Redmond, these events tended to focus on a plethora of topics and give you a taste of each one. With our Windows Phone 7 Boot Camp events, we tried something different. Focus on one topical area and give developers an opportunity to kick the tires in a semi-structured environment. We’ve taken some of the feedback with these events and have brought more of these free learning opportunities to you:

I’m happy to announce the upcoming Boot Camp series of free developer training events including: Web Camp, Windows Dev Boot Camp and Azure Boot Camp.

Web Camp

Microsoft’s Web Camps are events designed to teach you all about building websites using ASP.NET MVC, WebMatrix, OData and more. There are 1-day and 2-day events being offered with interactive sessions on:

• Introduce ASP.NET MVC, ASP.NET Web Pages and WebMatrix; discuss possible uses of these
• Explore new features of ASP.NET MVC 3
• Take a dive deep into jQuery
• Facilitate an in-depth discussion on when to migrate ASP.NET WebPages applications to ASP.NET MVC
• Discuss configuration and deployment of web applications.

Clark Sell has more details on the Web Camps taking place in the Central US.

Windows Dev Boot Camp

The Windows Development Boot Camp is a one-day deep dive class on client development. The event covers developing for Windows 7, Internet Explorer 9, and Silverlight 4 out of browser. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience presenting content, as well as a series of labs so you can write some code and practice what you just learned.

Interactive sessions will include topics from throughout the Windows development platform. We will look at application compatibility and transitioning your applications to Windows 7, integrating with the Windows taskbar, developing for IE9, utilizing the cool functionality in the Sensors and Location Platform so that your application better responds to its current environment, leveraging the multi-touch capabilities (especially in kiosk scenarios), and creating Silverlight 4 out of browser applications.

Azure Boot Camp

Windows Azure Boot Camp is a two day deep dive class to get you up to speed on developing for Windows Azure. The class includes a trainer with deep real world experience with Azure, as well as a series of labs so you can practice what you just learned. The agenda will cover:

• Introduction to Cloud Computing and Windows Azure
• Web Roles and Worker Roles
• Queues, Tables and Blobs
• Convincing the Business to use Windows Azure
• Diagnostic and Management API’s
• SQL Azure
• App Fabric
• Cloud Scenarios

For details and locations for each of these events, visit the respective website for each boot camp.

The release of Visual Studio 2010 is right around the corner. For several months, developers have been plugging away at the Beta bits and we have received valuable feedback. Based upon that feedback, the Visual Studio team has decided to push out a Release Candidate (RC) that is now available for you to download.

Jason Zander provides some additional details regarding the RC…

We got a lot of invaluable feedback on Beta 2 through Connect as well as your survey responses.  In particular many of you pointed out areas of performance where we were not at parity with VS2008 and it was impacting your ability to adopt the product.  Some of those areas of feedback included general UI responsiveness (including painting, menus, remote desktop and VMs), editing (typing, scrolling, and Intelisense), designers (Silverlight and WPF in particular), improved memory usage, debugging (stepping, managed / native interop), build times, and solution/project load.

You can now download the Visual Studio Release Candidate and continue to provide your valuable feedback.

Scott Guthrie is taking it one step further by inviting you to submit your feedback to the Visual Studio Connect website, but also sending him an email directly:

Our goal with releasing the public RC build today is to get a lot of eyes on the product helping to find and report the remaining bugs we need to fix.  If you do find an issue, please submit a bug report via the Visual Studio Connect site and also please send me an email directly (scottgu@microsoft.com) with details about it.  I can then route your email to someone to investigate and follow-up directly (which can help expedite the investigation).

The team is also looking for feedback regarding the install experience as well.

Visual Studio 2010 is a MAJOR release. A number of items (based on customer feedback) has been ripped and replaced with leading-edge technologies. All of this effort to gain customer feedback is to make sure we’re ALL (Microsoft and the community of developers and users) is happy with this release. We all want a tool that is going to help us succeed in what we do – write software!

Go download the bits now!

Today Soma announced the release of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Fx 4 Beta 2.  Soma also added a little nugget of information around the ship date of Visual Studio 2010 and .NET 4 – March 22, 2010.

The Beta 2 bits are available today for MSDN Subscribers and general availability will be October 21st. It was also announced that Beta 2 comes with a  “Go Live” license, which essentially states that Microsoft will provide a smooth upgrade path to the final release as well as provide support for the product.

Visual Studio 2010 is a huge undertaking. There are many enhancements not the least of which is a complete rewrite of the shell! There are also a number of improvements to the underlying .NET Framework to provide the means to build great applications on top of Windows 7. The first step for you is to download and install VS2010 and .NET 4 Beta 2. Brian Keller provides a nice walkthrough on how to download and install the necessary bits and get you up and running.

The next step is to download the Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Framework 4 Training Kit and work your way through all of the great training content. In addition, I’d set aside some time to watch the series of 10-4 episodes on Channel9 and learn about all the new features in VS2010 and .NET 4.

From there, I’d ask that you report bugs and provide feedback on the Visual Studio Connect Site. With your feedback we can be sure that Visual Studio 2010 is the product that *you* demand on March 22, 2010.

This is old news to some but new to many. Last winter, a number of Microsoft MVP’s and Regional Directors published a series of articles as part of a promotional program on MSDN called {You Shape} IT MSDN. Those articles have been combined and published as part of a book that you can now download for free called DevShaped.

This is a great collection of insights and essays from some of the stalwarts of the .NET developer community.

Working with Brownfield Code by Donald Belcham (Microsoft MVP)
Beyond C# and VB by Ted Neward (Microsoft MVP)
Remaining Valuable to Employers featuring Barry Gervin, Billy Hollis, Bruce Johnson, Scott Howlett, Adam Cogan, and Jonathan Zuck
All I Wanted Was My Data by Barry Gervin (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
Efficiency Upgrade by Derek Hatchard (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
Getting Started with Continuous Integration by Sondre Bjellås (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
On Strike at the Software Factory by Daniel Crenna (Microsoft MVP)
C# Features You Should Be Using by Ted Neward (Microsoft MVP)
Accelerate Your Coding with Code Snippets by Brian Noyes (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
Is Silverlight 2 Ready for Business Applications? by Jonas Follesø (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
Innovate with Silverlight 2 by Daniel Crenna (Microsoft MVP)
Real World WPF: Rich UI + HD by Gill Cleeren (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)
Hidden Talents by Peter Jones
Creating Useful Installers with Custom Actions by Christian Jacob
Banking with XML by Peter Jones
Sending Email by Derek Hatchard (Microsoft Regional Director and MVP)

You can download the PDF eBook at http://devshaped.com/files/developersdevelopers.pdf. For those of you who like to read offline, you can purchase a full-color version or black-and-white version from Lulu.

This week I am attending php|tek and while learning how to “Get it Done” from Wez Furlong, Soma announced on his blog that Visual Studio 2010 and .NET Fx 4 (Beta 1) has shipped to the developer masses.

You can download the bits, submit feedback to the Connect site and participate in the ongoing conversations on the Beta forums. The documentation has been removed from the download for Beta 1 but you can find all of the documentation online on MSDN.

Once you kicked off the download, be sure to read What’s New in .NET Framework 4 and What’s New in Visual Studio 2010.

You can install Visual Studio 2010 side-by-side with other versions of Visual Studio or you can drop it into a virtualized machine with something like Virtual PC.

Once you have everything up and running, download the Visual Studio 2010 Training Kit to learning about the latest features and enhancements. There are also a number of walkthroughs posted highlighting some of these new features.

Enjoy!