I recently had an ISV that took advantage of the new Mastering Silverlight 3 training from Wintellect. They raved about how it took their devs and archs from novice to expert in less than a week.

When ever I here that I try to let everyone know about it.

So here’s the skinny on the training:

You can find the flyers for the Silverlight 3 training courses on the Wintellect website. Here’s the two courses they have:

• Mastering Silverlight 3 for Developers (taught by Jeff Prosise)
• Mastering Silverlight 3 for Designers (taught by an ex-Flash/Flex designer)

Here’s a brief overview of each course:

Mastering Silverlight for Designers

The first course is “Mastering Silverlight 3 for Developers.” The flyer on the website contains a detailed syllabus for those who want to know what the course covers. Here are some highlights:

1. The course has been lengthened. It now runs 3 days without labs or 4 days with labs.
2. The course covers ALL the new features of Silverlight 3, including perspective (3D) support, GPU support, bitmap API, pixel shaders, animation easing, local connections, element-to-element data binding, out-of-browser apps, assembly caching, navigation framework (including back-button and deep linking support), style enhancements, and more.
3. The course now includes a dedicated module on Expression Blend 3 that covers new features such as SketchFlow. This module isn’t designed to turn developers into designers, but to acquaint developers with Expression Blend so they can collaborate with designers who use it—and even use it themselves if they want to. Note, however, that this course relies much more on Visual Studio than on Expression Blend. It is, after all, a course for developers.
4. If you are interested in .NET RIA Services (an add-on to Silverlight that will ship next year), the answer is they will be adding a module on .NET RIA Services later on, once it comes closer to shipping.  They have, however, been working with .NET RIA Services, so we can deliver an informal presentation on it if you are interested. That content is not an official part of the course.

Mastering Silverlight for Designers (taught by an ex-Flash/Flex designer!)

The second course on the Designer side of Silverlight, with the primary goal of easing the transition to Silverlight for Flash and Flex developers and designers, and also includes training on the use of Microsoft Expression Blend and Microsoft Expression Design.

Hope that some of you can take advantage of these courses. With Windows Azure launch just around the corner, ISVs are doing everything they can to get a Silverlight / Azure based solutions in the market. These really help to get you to a point where you can actually deliver.

Thanks for checking out this post!

Cheers,

Murray Gordon ISV Architect Evangelist Microsoft Corporation       http://blogs.msdn.com/MurrayG US ISV Team Blog  My GeeksWithBlogs Blog