The nice folks from Develop Mentor in the UK have kindly let me know about a great discount they are currently offering if you fancy heading over to London at short notice. They have a few places to fill in a 4-day course running next week, so are offering the course places for only £500 per place (+VAT).

Because it is such short notice, if you are interested, you'd best contact Berylyn directly at +44 (0)1242 533802 and tell her I sent you!

You may also be interested to know that Develop Mentor also have their re-written Guerrilla .NET 2.0 Event and it will be running at The Marriott Goodwood Park Hotel and Country Club, near Chichester, West Sussex, from 11-15 September. There will be a slight reduction for folks we refer - so if you are interested, let me know and I will pass your details onto them.  They are offering the course at £2,400 + VAT, which includes all accommodation, meals, etc.

Full course details are included below.

Effective .NET 2.0 Course Details

Effective .NET 2.0 is aimed at experienced .NET developers who want to hone their skills building robust “real-world” applications. Windows Forms, ASP.NET, and Web service developers all will find plenty of useful knowledge and techniques to apply to your own applications. Due to the detailed nature of the course a working knowledge of .NET version 1.1 or 2.0 is a practical necessity. Developers without reasonable familiarity with C# and .NET development are likely to be better served by Essential .NET. Developers with a background primarily in Visual Basic should consider Programming C# or our free online C# tutorial at http://www.develop.com/tutorials/csharp.

Effective .NET provides experienced .NET developers with practical knowledge and techniques for improving code intended for live production environments. Through lecture and hands-on labs this course explores three areas that are critical to the success of all applications – Memory management, Threads, and Exception management. You’ll learn effective practices for avoiding problems as well as learning how to troubleshoot problematic code. Real-world problems can’t always be solved by running in the Visual Studio debugger, so you will practice getting memory dumps from live systems and see how to use Visual Studio in concert with tools like WinDBG, SOS, and Performance Monitor to ferret out problems like memory leaks, deadlocks, and runaway threads. You’ll return from the week ready to design and build applications that avoid performance traps, scale predictably and gracefully handle “difficult” failures. You’ll also have a new understanding of deep debugging techniques that will help you unearth and fix the difficult bugs that inevitably arise in every system.

Please note that this course covers advanced topics on .NET application development. If you are new to .NET from Java or C++ consider our Essential .NET 2.0 course. If you are new to .NET from a Visual Basic background consider Programming C#.

Guerrilla .NET 2.0 Course Details

This intensive training event is designed for experienced .NET developers who plan to build applications in C# using version 2.0 of Microsoft’s .NET platform. This course covers a tremendous amount of material in a short time, so proper preparation is a must. Sample code and labs will be in C#, and a working knowledge of .NET version 1.1 is a practical necessity for getting the most out of the course. Developers without reasonable familiarity with C# and .NET development are likely to be better served by Essential .NET. Developers with a background primarily in Visual Basic should consider Programming C#.  This course is intended for working .NET developers who are ready to build large-scale .NET Applications. We will move quickly, so you should have at least six months experience using C# to develop .NET applications. You should be comfortable with C# and familiar with common .NET constructs like Assemblies, Delegates, Attributes, and the GAC as well as the basics of working with Windows Forms, and ASP.NET. Sample code and labs will be in C#.

Guerrilla .NET provides you with the tools you need to design, implement, debug, and deploy sophisticated and reliable applications. It continues our tradition of delivering a staggering amount of information along with a healthy dose of fun. During the week you will work (and play) hard. When you return you will have a new understanding of the ins and outs of the .NET 2.0 platform.
At Guerrilla .NET you will learn from a team of known industry experts and you will work and socialize with a group of peers, allowing you to get all of your questions answered quickly. A variety of social activities (including our tradition of challenges throughout the week) and a steady supply of caffeine will help keep your energy and interest levels high all week.

Highlights include:

• The importance of Generics and Nullable types
• Wielding new C# features like Anonymous Delegates and Iterator methods
• New Windows Forms Features: New controls, toolbars, and BackgroundWorker
• Building UIs with Windows Presentation Foundation (“Avalon”) and XAML
• An In-depth look at using ClickOnce to simplify large-scale application deployment
• Five modules on multithreaded development – the thread pool, delegates, and custom threads
• Writing reliable asynchronous code using synchronization objects like Monitors, events, and Mutexes
• Three modules on Power Debugging with Visual Studio, WinDBG, and SOS
• New ADO.NET 2.0 features
• Working with transactions, including interop with COM+
• Using .NET Remoting and MSMQ
• A look at upcoming .NET technologies