I spent three days last week at an introduction course for .Net. We have an application at work written in C# and ASP .Net and given the fact the course was free, my boss seemed like it would be a good idea for me to get some of this exposure. The course was thought by a Microsoft Partner here in Phoenix whose focus is .Net software

The first two days focused on .Net development with an emphasis on ASP, ADO and a lot of talk about Web Services . Best practices and some security (encryption, authentication and authorization) concepts were covered on the third day. Given the cost of the course, nothing, I guess you can say we really got what we paid for. The course in general seemed to be more of an extended demo of Visual Studio .Net 2003, since none of the concepts were covered in much detail. This is not the presenter’s fault since she was following the curriculum provided by Microsoft.

I was able to get a better idea about the .Net framework and some of the inner workings behind this technology. As we are looking to integrate our commercial application into some of our internal applications, this knowledge will be very important. Maybe this the purpose behind any course that uses the term "introduction" in its title?

Aside the .Net content, these are some off-topic conclusions I came up over the three days:

• There seems to be more women working and developing with .Net than with Java
• There are a lot of people that continue to believe that Apple forces you to use a one button mouse
• There are corporate consultants that continue to believe and spread the misconception that only graphic designers use Macs
• Visual Studio 2003 continues to get in the way when you are trying to just code a project
• Reliability, Security, Privacy and Business Integrity are the 4 pillars behind Microsoft’s "Trustworthy Computing" strategy. mmmm
• Microsoft certainly has a way with reaching developers – food, books, t-shirts and trial software is always welcome