But you don't get a physical book with your registration of one of the Express products. You actually get a one year registration to the new Microsoft My Learning. The three books they're "giving away" are added to an initial account for you. The book reading software is standard, but the rest of Microsoft My Learning is pretty cool.
I can remember when Microsoft ran a top training company, Microsoft University, and offered both online and in-person training classes. (Got the mug and the T-shirt!) But training has never been their core business and they've always operated it as a supporting player for their software business. This is why they have always had difficulty deciding exactly what type of training to provide. Microsoft My Learning is just the most recent version.
It is a slick product and, like a lot of Microsoft's work, it's a great demonstration of what they can do internally with their own technology. (One of the best Bill Gates quotes is, "At Microsoft, we eat our own dog food.")
The training at Microsoft My Learning is heavy on corporate development with typical pricing targeted at a corporate training budget that can easily absorb $350 for a single online course. For example, there were 12 courses under the heading, "Microsoft Windows Server System" compared with just 2 under "Visual Studio .NET".
But there are quite a number of "free" courses, too. ("Free" just like a you can get a "free" dinner for listening to a real estate sales pitch.) For example, the free course "Introduction to Visual Studio Team System" is primarily about Microsoft's official version of the software development life cycle and how it ties into their top end corporate development product. (If Visual Studio Team System was a truck, it would be a fully loaded stretched Hummer.)
Last year, I wrote that when IBM bought Rational Software (the clear leader in software project planning and analysis) it put Microsoft in a difficult position because they had been supporting UML up to that point and UML was actually invented by Rational's founders. It was an easy prediction that Microsoft wouldn't be supporting UML anymore. I wrote that it would be interesting to see what they would do instead.
The answer is now clear and it's called Visual Studio Team System. The free "Introduction to Visual Studio Team System" presents a view of software development that is completely free of any suggestion that there is any other way to develop software ... and certainly no mention of UML.
Another problem is that, like the whole .NET 2.0 world right now, Microsoft My Learning is evidently a beta product too. Response was sluggish and not everything worked the first time. They recommend a broadband connection and they're not kidding. Microsoft products traditionally reach just beyond the comfortable limits of hardware and this one is no exception.
But it did work the second time and it's as technically sophisticated as any online page I have tried yet. It's worth working your way through a free course just to appreciate the state of Microsoft's web based software art. Try it! It's a trip!
