Pluralsight On-Demand
A little while back David Star asked on Twitter if somebody knew an OSS project that he could use for a Pluralsight tutorial and I suggested my CQRS example. As it turned out he liked it and offered a trail subscription of the Pluralsight On-Demand library in return. And now I am writing about it, so I guess that makes everybody happy.
Disclaimer: I am not earning anything by writing this post and have no affiliation with Pluralsight what so ever. While it is true that David can decide to drop my blog from Elegant Code whenever he seems fit, this fact did not influence this post in any way 
After only having watched a few tutorials and one part of the Agile course I can already say that the quality and clarity is very high. The instructors do a really good job in explaining the different topics in great detail and at the right pace.
Content
The content that Pluralsight On-Demand offers is very orientated towards the Microsoft product offerings, they include (but are not limited by); ASP.NET, ASP.NET MVC, WCF, WPF, .NET, SharePoint, BizTalk and Visual Studio. The offerings are divided into three different categories; How-To Videos, Tutorials and Training Courses. The time you spend on one subject in the different categories ranges from 5 minutes to 22 hours.
Of course I first went in and watched the recording David made while using my code (just to see what kind of bad things he had to say about it). I have to say I was pleased with the time spend watching it, given that I now know how to start using some techniques in Visual Studio 2010 that makes discovering and reviewing code and its structure a lot easier. And I learned this in only 20 minutes.
Currently I am watching the Agile course that again is presented by David, and again the structure and clarity is very good. An other good thing is that this course is split up into many smaller parts that you can skip to of replay, so there is no need to write down some time-code information in order to hear something again, or when you take a break.
After this I think I’ll take a look at some more indebt LINQ stuff.
OSS and Design practices
The content that I am missing a bit are describing / tutoring the various open source products and different coding patterns and practices. But I guess a.t.m. TekPub and DimeCasts are good supplements to fill these gaps.
Finally
I would highly recommend looking at this when you have to learn a new or brush-up on a Microsoft technology. In the meantime I still have quit some time left on my trail, so I am going to enjoy some more tutorials, and my next post would hopefully be technical again 
I cannot sing enough praises on the on-demand service. This is absolutely the next best thing to being actually being in a class. Sure you may miss out the interactions in a class, but the content is beyond great. Do yourself a favor and get a subscription to ondemand. New price plans make it an absolute no-brainer.
That’s kind of you, Mark. Thank you.
I agree that we need to beef up some content around patterns and practices, and popular .NET OSS offerings. I’ll say this: Stay tuned!
Moving into 2010 we should have some alternatives for you.
@David Starr
Yeah for me personally patterns and practices are something I’ll always be interested in while certain technologies, well they come and go
@David Starr
David,
It’s really great to see increasing interest in tutorials and courses about OSS in .NET
Kudos for that guys. When do you plan to create tutorial about Castle Project?
@Krzysztof
Honestly, that’s not on the radar. Here’s the thing: I have been stunned by my 18 months as a trainer and consultant by what I have found in the enterprises of the world.
I have not found developers who need another option for IoC or a new technique for writing tests, but rather people who simply have never heard of these things. The software craftsman in me dies a little everytime I get a blank stare about what unit tests are, and he’s taken a lot of damage.
So, here is my pledge and what I want to do in my career: Help developers care.
For many, this is simply getting them jazzed about their day-to-day existence as a developer. In my experience, this is a mix of agile software development and craftsmanship.
Light their fires with the basics and help them understand that there is a better world out there. One filled with passionate people like yourself who read blogs, want to learn, and accept that none of us will ever be a master.
If I can do that, they’ll find the Castle Project all on their own.
Wow. Where did that come from?
@David Starr
Hehe Do I see a blog post coming David
I am guessing the default IoC (if they even know what it is) is Unity?
Perhaps that is a good distinction between Pluralsight and TekPub; TebPub targets the more Alt.Net crowd where Pluralsight does not?
@mark we don’t target anyone really – just trying to “keep it real”. If anything we target the junior developers with our free series stuff and when they’re ready we move on to other things.
Truth is we haven’t rolled out our mainline MS stuff yet – but it’s coming. We are very interested in *not* overlapping with Pluralsight and others – Aaron and Fritz (my wife calls him “French”…) have talked a lot with us and there is definitely a difference in audience simply based on what Pluralsight does currently.
@Rob conery
It is good not to overlap for sure, one thing that I would like to see is someone (could be me, might do that actually) providing some recordings on re-factoring into patterns, one pattern per recording, but perhaps a few examples per recording.
When I talk to developers and mention a pattern or principle then most of the times I get a blank stare back, now instead of pointing them to some _really_ _good_ books it would be easier to point them to a screen cast. Because developers don’t want to read, it needs to be easy
The Pluralsight On-Demand! library definitely targets the Microsoft developer community. Our goal is to provide deep and meaningful coverage of everything Microsoft developers care about today, but not necessarily limited to technologies produced by Microsoft itself.
For example, in 2010 we are planning to add more “craftmanship” oriented content, courses on design patterns, practices (Agile, Scrum, etc), and other things that the ALT.NET community might care about. We’ll also be expanding our language coverage, cloud platform coverage, and may include some open source coverage if it’s compelling for Microsoft developers. We have a very aggressive content plan for 2010.
We really respect what Rob and team are doing with TekPub and think there’s actually some good synergy between the two companies (both based on content focus and price), as the author noted in the original post.