Visual Studio 2008 Training

Question

I've been put in charge of coming up with a training itinerary for my team at work for a migration from c++ to Visual Studio 2008 with C#.

The actual language switch I'm not too worried about, its the learning curve to Visual Studio. What does everything think would be the best way to set up a training course?

I was thinking of having a list of different features of the IDE and having the team members create pages on our internal wiki on them, but I'm not sure if that would be hands on enough to be useful.

Answer 1

I think you're right to worry that the wiki thing wouldn't be hands-on enough.

How about using it as an opportunity to refresh your process too, and do a mini project "Bootcamp" where you test drive the new language and IDE features along with some new development practices. Actually create a piece of software over the course of a week or so.

Answer 2

MS has Visual Studio training kit. I think the best way is to teach the basics and then start using it in projects. Let them learn the features they need as they are using it on a project.

Answer 3

We are a C++ shop, that is moving to C# for UI work (our image processing and 3D graphics code will stay in native C++). I found C# for C++ Developers a very quick and handy introduction to the language. Our team has been using Visual Studio for while, whereas I came from an SVN/Slickedit/CMake/Ant kind of environment in my last job. I found it very helpful to just dive in and start working, but as I figured things out, I documented them on our internal wiki. It's been about 6 months, but not only am I very comfortable with Visual Studio, but the rest of the team has had me streamlining our build process, and converting our build system to do out-of-place builds from Visual Studio (which I document on the wiki, of course). So I'd say do both - dive in and do real work, but document what you learn - which not only helps others, but it reinforces it in your mind.

Answer 4

I purchased the on-demand training from pluralsight about 4 months ago and IMHO is the best training out there.

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