Tuesday, September 02, 2008 9:45 AM
In a previous post I started to get in to how I was surprised by the amount of detail Chris Givens put in to creating this course. Nevertheless I am still astounded at the amount of detail and the depth he goes in to.
Let me back up a bit here. I have been requested to teach Chris's Advanced SharePoint Developer course at AmeriTeach next week (9/8 – 9/12). So I spent much of last week getting deeper in to the instructor demos and the course labs. I was very impressed not only by the amount of detail Chris goes in to as mentioned before, but by how deep he gets in to the module subject. I am over half way through the course and can definitely tell you that he has taught me a few new things.
Let's take an example of a regular course. Generally you will have a couple of modules on working with the basic SharePoint interfaces getting used to what SharePoint is all about. Then you move on to a quick primer on Office SharePoint Designer 2007 with some very quick and general overview topics of what you can use it for and side effects. And then get in to other areas of SharePoint development. While this is a good path, it definitely is different from what Chris has chosen to do. From the start Chris starts in to some deep detail about how to set up FBA, SSO, and other techniques. From there he goes in to SharePoint customization.
The next topic after all of this was SharePoint Designer. What caught my eye right out of the gate was that the course has two modules dedicated to SPD. I was kind of surprised due to the fact that I have never seen another "Development" course hit SPD so hard, but I soon realized why. While I was making my way through the content I found I was learning a slew of new things that I never knew Designer could do. (Alas, the reason I love being a trainer. I get to learn all the time.) My personal perspective of SPD before going through the course was not good. However after this part of the course I will start to look at it as a tool that I will keep in my arsenal. With the new functionality that the course has covered helped me with this paradigm shift.
As I keep making my way though the course I will post more reviews of the content. Also if you are interested in taking the course AmeriTeach will be running it next week and also again in November. Look for the schedule at their site.
Michael