What one person calls free online courses, others call marketing materials. The knowledge obtained in most of them is not easily transferable to other technology stacks.
These are actually courses on how to order food at French McDonald's stores. They are absolutely useless if you want to go to any other restaurant in France.
What one person calls free online courses, others call marketing material
These are both. Not just one, nor just the other
The knowledge obtained in most of them is not easily transferable to other technology stack.
that is questionable at least. For example for programming laguages they teach both the language and the tools. The language is easily transferable. Well it's not even a transfer, it's just the language [1]. And the tools might be pretty similar depending on which stask you transfer to.
[1] apart from possible minor differences of course, like in the C++ compiler. Not sure if there is a difference for things like JavaScript?
A bit of the JS stuff seems to be geared towards writing Windows 8 UI apps... so that's not really transferable, but I think it is at least interesting... Also, some of it can apply to say GTK apps.
> The knowledge obtained in most of them is not easily transferable to other technology stacks
That's not really a problem when you are interested in learning this specific technology stack.
This is complaining that learning Windows Server administration didn't prepare you for managing a Linux server. At some point in time, you learn specifics.
As much as I understand what you're saying in here (and I'm not defending Microsoft, because it's not my favourite tech company), would you expect them giving courses about J2EE and how to use Erlang?
I can say I was at least a little surprised they didn't have anything for node.js, considering how much they're starting to use it internally, and how much they've invested into getting node.js working as a first class citizen in Windows.
I don't know about Erlang, but a lot of J2EE deployments are on Windows servers. It would make some sense even if the goal was to sell Windows servers.
You're right about deployments of J2EE on Windows servers, my point here was that they might have guides on how to tie some knots together to make Java <> Windows play nicely, but I wouldn't expect too much. After all, Microsofts target is providing you with full solution to your business needs.
They need to start giving free guides, giving software (BizSpark) might not be enough if people don't know how to use it. And as much as I dislike some of the policies which Microsoft has, I would be lying when telling, that I didn't found pleasure while working with tools like SQLServer or the.
Also, as tracker1 said below - I'm also surprised with node. They know that getting some other languages (ruby, python) to work on Windows can be a bit "hard", especially in production deployments (try using some tools written in ruby, like veewee + vagrant + virtualbox combo), you would expect that they would at least advertise nodejs more.
It might have been a different training program, but Microsoft used to award points for completing these kinds of training exercises, which you could redeem for physical goods like keyboard, mice, xbox controllers, games etc. So it was pretty clearly a marketing device back then.
