Last week I attended a course, called “Essential .NET 4.5 with C#”, in London. The course was hosted by Developmentor (currently in the process of joining Global Knowledge), and the course instructor was Ron Sumida.

The course is aimed at people who is starting with C# and .Net, after a year or so, of experience with Java or C++. I don’t have that experience, but I have been working with .Net at my job for the last half year, and before that a few months on my own time. I still thought the course seemed right for me, as I am self-taught in the world of .Net, and I was not disappointed.

Essential .NET 4.5 with C# covers all the topics any .Net developer should know. One thing I liked in particular was that it didn’t just show how to do different things, but it went under the hood. We got to see how different features worked beneath the cover, which helps understanding why you would use such and such, as well as decide on what to use when. Seeing as I have worked with .Net I found myself realizing why certain aspects of code I have worked with is written in certain ways.

Like I mentioned we covered a lot of topics. Some of the topics I found interesting was about threading, delegates & events, linq and reflection. These were the ones I needed to understand better, and I can definitely say I’m better equipped to work with these features now (although like with everything else it needs practice). The first module we covered were “Architecture”, which covered the internals of .Net and C#. Basically how to compile, how to reference libraries, how the compiler works etc. On the last day we choose to go off topic the last few hours. Three of the participants had to leave, and the rest of us decided to see some of the basics of AngularJS. Although not something I had planned to look into, it did trigger some interest, so I might have to learn some more of it.

In total the course lasted 5 days, so it was a lot to cover. There was also supposed to be lab assignments in between all the modules, however for a lot of the topics we just didn’t have time to do them all in class. We were only 5 people physically in class, and one remote from USA (and I’m really glad I was not in his shoes, attending the course at 3 AM his time). I found this to be rather nice, as we all got to ask questions we had and we had several good discussions, both in class and in the breaks.

Ron Sumida was great as an instructor, you could tell he was passionate about teaching and the technology. He is really experienced, and knows what he’s talking about, as you can read from Developmentors instructor page:

Dr. Sumida is one of the first instructors at DevelopMentor, and has been working with Microsoft technologies for 20 years. He began his Windows software development career doing user interface programming in the Win16 API on Windows 3.1, continued through the Win32 era working with both user interfaces and operating system services, and then spent five years working with COM. For the last 10 years, he has been working exclusively with .NET related technologies.

All in all I’m quite happy with the course, and I am really glad I got to attend it. If you are in a position where you have worked some with .Net (or Java/C++), and need some more formal training, I can recommend this course!