Thank you everyone for your response on my posts so far. I am trying my best to share my knowledge with everyone. In this post, we will see how we can get benefits from several Microsoft services offered to developers for free, yes you heard it right, for free. We always struggle to find the best learning resources from the web when Microsoft already has several things for developers.
Introduction
In today’s world, technology is growing at a speed at which we cannot imagine. Every year, there are many new things in every technology we are working on. 7 years ago, when I started my career, Framework 2.0 was widely used, and now we have .NET core available, VS 2005 to VS 2015. We cannot even imagine using the same framework for long periods, as everyone is scared they will lose market value. To be frank, people need experienced people in new releases in every technology, but sometimes they are still using the old ones, this is my personal experience. But as an organization, this is fair enough to expect, as they need to show in the market that they have the best resources available, and can deliver products on the latest technologies.
So let’s get back to our topic, as a developer we should always upgrade ourselves, your organization will pay for the work they need from you and what the current project needs, our learning is always our responsibility, some organization has some training available, to keep ourselves updated with the latest technologies, but in most of the cases, we are on our own to learn and upgrade.
So let’s see the things which Microsoft offers us.
1. Microsoft Studio Dev Essentials
As developers, we all are aware of Visual Studio, but are you aware that there is a website https://beta.visualstudio.com/ where you can get learning resources for free.
Follow the below given steps to unlock many free things.
- Once you visit this website, you will see several links on the website like Visual Studio, Visual Team Services and Visual Studio Code.
- When you hover over Products menu, see All Product, you will see a link for Dev Essentials. Click on the link. You will be redirected to a new page shown below.
- Now click on Join or access now. If you have a Microsoft Account, you can directly use the same credentials, otherwise you can create a new one.
- Post login or account creation. It will redirect to a new page where it will load all benefits. It may take some time so be patient, you will be redirected to the below page.
- There are multiple sections “Featured”, “Tools”, “Education” and “Support”.
- Now you can get a download link to free IDE and many more learning things, which includes free subscription for 3 months on Pluralsight and $25 credit for Azure and many more things.
- Feel free to explore all the things from the menu, but wait this is not it. If you notice there on top right corner, it has your name, click on the name, now you will be redirected to a new website.
- Now you can create and manage repository online and also you will have the option either to choose from TFS or GIT, just think about how easy it is to work in a project from a different location, click on Create new account, we will get the below page.
2. Official Website
We can get many tutorials from visiting the official website as well as by just visiting the ASP.NET.
- You will see a link called Learn, visit ASP.NET if you want to learn framework, other link is to study ASP.NET core.
Conclusion
There are many things available to study. You can get an article on CodeProject, there are groups available on FB, linkedin, etc.
Also you can follow Scott Hanselman, Scott Guthrie for more learning resources.
Keep following my blog for more information, you can also mail me at santosh.yadav198613@gmail.com.
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Thank you for reading this post.
