Uh-huh
The Boot Camp has been survived – I'm still alive and now equipped with a fancy diploma, a hefty stack of hands-on lab exercises, a little bit of new knowledge and not much else. It would be unfair to say I was disappointed by the course – but pretty close. Two days of a new platform, and all they did was show us a bunch of demos and make us work on some (admittedly really good) exercise tasks.
Trying to keep the rant short: It's ridiculous to just pour as much information as you can during a two-day course. It'll never sink into anyone's head in that time. When people don't learn, they'll blame themselves ("I guess I was told that, I just didn't understand"), so it's basically a good deal for the business. But how about spending some more time actually teaching the issues and making sure people really remember something after the course is over? What's the worth in stating "ASP.net 2 has a provider architecture" if people have no idea on its impact on development practices?
Knowledge is relatively easy to distribute, understanding far less so. If I go and get tutored by professionals, I'd really expect more than just recitals of press releases and published tutorials. But here at work again, I'm still facing the same basic problem: Knowledge does very little as long as you don't truly understand how a feature should be used. Dabbling in new technology is cool, but making it work in a production application requires so much more. Hey… It's called experience. Too bad only few educators are ready to share theirs.
To avoid being totally negative, many Whidbey-related things handled (well, "mentioned" would be more accurate) during the course make great subjects for some blog posts. Also, I finally look forward to clearing my task backlog during the weekend. I'll be back.
March 18, 2005
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Jouni Heikniemi В· 
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