Microsoft Virtual Academy for free video training

I'm always kind of surprised when people ask me where to go to learn how to program. I went to school for Communications and learned about computer science after I graduated. Talk about time wasted. I learned to program from YouTube and books. I can see the value in a degree, but with all of the free resources online today, I feel that online content is really starting to have an edge, especially when you consider how up to date much of it is.

Microsoft has their Virtual Academy, which is video content, slides, and source code that is largely created by Engineers, Program Managers, and Tech Evangelists at the company. Below are just a few that I've found to be helpful:

I'm having to study for the Azure 70-532 exam right now, and this is incredibly helpful. The content was put together by my peer, Bret Stateham. 

As a JavaScript developer, this was particularly useful, because I can easily reuse code and content from my web projects (such as my Super Rawr-Type game) and wrap it as a Windows 8 app, and I'm good to go.

They say the last 10% takes 90% of your time

You are certainly not limited to TFS or VSO, as I use Git for most of my projects, especially those on the web. You can see my public GitHub projects here.

I'll be completely honest with you -- I just made the switch from Chrome to Firefox for browsing, but I'm all about IE when it comes to debugging. These tools help illustrate why.

If you've been following along with my blog at all, then you know that I love writing cross platform applications, specifically with Cordova. You can now do that in Visual Studio.