I’ve been working on an exciting project at Microsoft that I wanted to share with you. Recently, Microsoft established a partnership with the Harvard/MIT joint educational project called edX to deliver free and certified technical training in MOOC-style classes. My team and I have been actively involved in creating courseware for this partnership and have seen a phenomenal response. These courses are designed to provide depth technical training on topics that range from C#, Bootstrap, and Transact-SQL to PowerShell Fundamentals and programming Office 365.

I’m working directly on the Introduction to TypeScript course that covers the basics of programming small to large scale JavaScript applications using this new framework. TypeScript essentially enables you to write type-safe code at design time which can dramatically reduce run-time JavaScript errors and make managing code bases much easier. I’ve had the opportunity to work with programming language luminary Anders Hejlsberg on this project and that has been a ton of fun. You can enroll in that course for free here.

The partnership between Microsoft and edX gives both companies an opportunity to reach hundreds of thousands of students across the globe and provide depth training to many that would not have the opportunity to learn these topics.

For more information, see the edX press release here. Engadget has also done a write up and provides more information into the joint venture. The project also got some press in the venerable Harvard Crimson.

Visit the edX Microsoft page for a listing of all the free courses and register any that interest you. Let me know if there are any questions I can answer.

Paul