The Silverlight Tour is one of the most intensive courses in Silverlight 4. It takes just 4 days to learn and experience the ins and outs of design, development and server-side programming with Silverlight.
We talk to one of the course organizers in Canada - Laurent Duveau - on why should a person invest in attending this course, and what s/he should expect to achieve through it.
Q. Laurent – the Silverlight Tour announced a draw giving one free pass to The Silverlight Tour in Vancouver, May 3-6, 2010 to a member of SilverlightShow Community. For those who are not aware of what the course covers, could you please introduce it - who may benefit from it, what is the basic structure of this course, in which countries may it be taken?
A. This course was created by Shawn Wildermuth for teaching Silverlight in USA, and it is now available worldwide through partners in Canada, France, Switzerland, Latin America, Spain, Australia, UK, and others.
It is an intensive course in which students learn the ins and outs of design, development and server-side programming with Silverlight in an exciting way, through a mix of lessons, demonstrations and hands-on labs with tools such as Visual Studio 2010, Expression Blend 4, DeepZoom, etc. You can learn more on www.silverlight-tour.com
Q. How is this course different from other similar Silverlight trainings?
A. This is in fact a real workshop taught by industry experts. Students come with their laptop and build a project during the course.
Q. What's next for a person who took the Silverlight Tour training course? How should s/he continue improving his skills?
A. The course provides such a high level of content, covering every single feature of Silverlight, so I think the next step is really about working and applying the new skills on a real project.
Q. Could you name examples of Silverlight professionals who started out with The Silverlight Tour training and advanced quite a lot in their professional development?
A. Bill Gates! ;-) joking aside recently while at MIX I met one of my students from a course in Vancouver back in 2009 and he told me that he has been working on quite a few Silverlight projects since then, and was happy with what he was able to achieve.
Q. You've just come back from MIX. What are your impressions from it - sessions you are most impressed with, announcements you consider important? How would the news released on MIX affect the Silverlight Tour course structure?
A. MIX was awesome; I saw very good sessions but even better is the possibility to do networking with industry experts and the Microsoft team. The good news is we can now deliver the course with Silverlight 4 RC as it was just released at MIX. Before that, we already showed the new features of Silverlight 4, but students used version 3 for the labs. We now do everything with VS2010!
Q. Do you plan to expand Silverlight Tour trainings - make them more frequent, teach advanced Silverlight courses, enter other countries?
A. Yes we plan to deliver at least one course per month, and visit new cities like Winnipeg, Victoria, Ottawa, Calgary and Halifax. We also have an Advanced Silverlight Training (2 days) and we are ready to teach for the new Windows Phone 7!
Thanks Laurent for this interview! We are looking forward to finding out who would be the winner in the draw! We'll keep posting more news about the Tour, and will be eager to get feedback from the draw winner on his experience in Vancouver!