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As Microsoft continues to cozy up to the open source community, the company is enlisting assistance from partners to not only promote its open-source offerings, but also to help developers get better acquainted with the Microsoft stack.
With that in mind, Microsoft tapped Coding Dojo, a software development training firm and coding bootcamp pioneer, to provide training on .NET Core. .NET Core is an open-source, cross-platform implementation of Microsoft’s .NET Framework that runs on Windows, with ports for Linux, OS X and FreeBSD. Microsoft released .NET Core 1.0 at the end of June.
On August 18, Coding Dojo announced an expansion of its roster of full-stack training programs with an ASP.NET Core class created in collaboration with Microsoft. With its portfolio of classes, Coding Dojo will provide training on the full .NET Core stack. In addition, the bootcamp company is working with Microsoft on supplemental courses.
As evidenced by Microsoft’s August 18 move to open-source its PowerShell automation platform and scripting language, Microsoft is serious about enabling open-source software on its platforms and empowering open-source developers. Initially available only for Windows, PowerShell is now live on GitHub and is available on Windows, Linux and macOS. It consists of a command-line shell and associated scripting language built on the .NET Framework.
Like PowerShell, which is built on .NET, .NET itself was originally designed for Windows only. However, the open-source .NET Core platform is aimed at the broader developer community, including cloud and mobile developers building Android and iOS applications—which creates a major opportunity for training, said Kevin Saito, vice president of product management and marketing at Coding Dojo.
“Now that .NET can run on anything from a Raspberry Pi to a giant cloud-based application that is relied upon by millions of customers, developers have a whole new world of possibilities available to them,” said Martin Woodward, executive director of the .NET Foundation, in a statement. “Training courses like Coding Dojo’s are an essential part of introducing developers to the amazing open-source.NET community.”
Coding Dojo’s experience in practical coding education made them an ideal choice to bring .NET Core to new developers, Woodward added.
“Coding Dojo has an incredibly interesting model where they teach five developer stacks to their students with ASP.NET Core being the sixth,” Maria Naggaga, a program manager on the Visual Studio and .NET Team at Microsoft, told eWEEK. “We picked Coding Dojo because its model offers their students a breadth of job opportunities. And the introduction of ASP.NET Core to the stacks already being taught will open up even more opportunities for them.”
Naggaga said Microsoft Virtual Academy has worked with Coding Dojo in the past to deliver content on Ruby and PHP.
For his part, Saito said the ASP.NET Core class will initially be taught on-site at Coding Dojo’s Bellevue, Wash. campus as part of its standard 14-week bootcamp. The company will offer a beta course beginning next month and the first official class will begin in October 2016. After that, the class will be available at additional Coding Dojo campuses and as part of Coding Dojo’s online program in 2017. Coding Dojo has campuses in Chicago, Dallas, Los Angeles, Seattle, Silicon Valley and Washington D.C.
Microsoft, Coding Dojo Launch .NET Core Training
“Coding Dojo already offers the widest range of full-stack training classes in the coding bootcamp industry, and our ASP.NET Core class will widen that gap,” said Martin Puryear, lead instructor at Coding Dojo, in a statement. “Existing C# and .NET classes are based on the previous generation, except for a few shorter online-only offerings. In our immersive onsite bootcamp we work hard to strike the right balance — not too shallow, not too narrow — making ours the only course to fully prepare a student to work across this entire software stack.”
Moreover, Saito noted that as the Coding Dojo courses cover C# and .NET — which are commonly used in enterprise environment – in detail, the training will be especially useful for students with open-source experience who want to transition into positions with larger enterprises.
“There is definitely a demand for these skills,” Saito told eWEEK. “The typical software development landscape falls into two camps — open stack/web technologies and Microsoft’s stack. Obviously, we already do a lot with open stack technologies, but there are a lot of jobs available that focus on Microsoft’s stack. Given we’re the only bootcamp that will offer this curriculum, we clearly see a lot of opportunity in this area.”
Meanwhile, Saito said Coding Dojo and Microsoft are working together on additional programming courses, including “Programming with Python for Data Science” on the edX training site that will launch on August 22.
In addition, instructors from Coding Dojo and Microsoft are also teaching “Getting Started with Web Technologies” and “Introduction to Angular 2.0” through the Microsoft Virtual Academy (MVA), which provides free online training for developers, Saito said. Additional Microsoft and Coding Dojo developed MVA courses covering Ruby on Rails and PHP will be launched in late 2016, he noted.
Coding Dojo is fortunate to have collaborated with multiple groups at Microsoft, Saito told eWEEK.
“We are in ongoing conversations with Microsoft about future opportunities to work together, but have not announced anything more at this time,” he said.
Naggaga said Microsoft will continue to collaborate with Coding Dojo to grow and improve the .NET, C#, Xamarin and other Microsoft courses they want to teach.
In these classes as well as in all of its programs, Coding Dojo delivers technical content to audiences that range from having little or no experience to veteran software developers with years of experience, Saito said.
“The biggest thing that Coding Dojo brings to those courses is the ability to explain things to a diverse audience that ranges from beginners to industry veterans looking to broaden their skills,” he noted. “We are probably the only coding bootcamp that accepts people solely based on fit and passion and not prior coding experience.”