# Saturday, 14 June 2014

My latest Pluralsight course, Introduction to Visual Studio 2013 - Part 2 is live and ready for action. The modules are:

  • Basic Debugging
  • Additional Debugging Features
  • IntelliTrace
  • Working With Designers
  • Extensions

If you haven't watched Part 1, you really should.

What's my next course? I'm trying to decide that at the moment and will let you know when it's underway.

Kate

Saturday, 14 June 2014 16:21:12 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Friday, 23 May 2014

I've completed my development of my latest Pluralsight course and I'm just waiting for it to go live. Here are the "teaser" images  I posted to Twitter and my public Facebook page as I was developing it:

This was fun to put together and it's nice to get into things so many people don't know. I hope you take a look at it once it's live and learn from it!

Kate

Friday, 23 May 2014 09:38:00 (Eastern Daylight Time, UTC-04:00)  #    
# Friday, 28 February 2014

I have updated my Visual Studio Pluralsight course for Visual Studio 2013 and Part 1 is now live. It covers features that were newly added in the 2013 release as well as older material (so you don't need to take the 2012 courses before you take this one.) It focuses on how to work Visual Studio rather than on the mechanics of a particular programming language or framework. The demos are all in C# but almost all of it applies to other languages equally well. (As C++ developers know, some things we don't get, but we're used to that.)

A number of people who've been using Visual Studio for years have reported to me that they decided to watch the course just to see what features I felt were worth covering - and then accidentally learned something! Chances are you will, too, so why not watch on double speed and see if something comes up you didn't know before?

Kate

Friday, 28 February 2014 12:49:26 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Sunday, 23 February 2014

I was invited to speak to some Imagine Cup contestants in Calgary and delighted to accept. I spoke to the teams informally for quite a while about judging and judges and general team tips. I was really happy to see some teams from previous years so I could hear what happened after they entered. If you're a student (undergrad or grad) and would like to enter, there is theoretically still time, but realistically it would have been better to start several months ago since you do have to build working software. Why not take a look at the contest (there are over a million dollars in prizes, and you can get a cool trip somewhere and meet some industry high flyers) and start pulling together a team for next year? There's a pretty good introduction for Canadians on the Microsoft Canada blog.

For those of you who were at the sessions, here are the slides I used in the afternoon. I talked about the new C++ features and why they matter, and demoed C++ AMP as a great motivator for using C++. (I wanted to upload the pptx files, but they're too big for the blog, so I've exported PDFs.)

Kate

GregoryCppAMP.pdf (1.65 MB)

Cpp11and14.pdf (556.51 KB)

Sunday, 23 February 2014 13:17:11 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Saturday, 23 November 2013
The C++ Jumpstart full day event on Tuesday was a blast! James and I really enjoyed ourselves and from the looks of the chat room, so did the attendees. We had literally thousands of people registered for the event and in a few weeks the recording should be available (check http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com/Live-Training-Events for a recording link - scroll past Live Events to Recorded Events) for even more people to view.

Kate

Saturday, 23 November 2013 13:44:50 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #    
# Friday, 22 November 2013
I've been busy this fall with the release of Visual Studio 2013. One of the things I've been working on is live now: a new Pluralsight course. I focused on new things that matter to C++ developers, whether that's compiler support for language changes (hello, variadic templates!) or IDE changes that were implemented for C++ as well as "the other languages". Here's the description:

The C++ Language and the Standard Library both changed dramatically with the release of C++ 11. Some of these features were not implemented until Visual Studio 2013, and those are presented in this course. You'll learn about variadic templates, improvements in constructing and initializing variables, and rawnstring literals. In addition a number of productivity boosting enhancements in debugging, editing, and using libraries are in this version and you will learn how to take advantage of them.

If you don't have a Pluralsight subscription already, there's a free trial available, so please check it out!

Kate

Friday, 22 November 2013 13:36:27 (Eastern Standard Time, UTC-05:00)  #