Microsoft releases free Windows Apps programming course
Microsoft's Windows 10 development for absolute beginners course hast just been published by the company to its Channel 9 website.
The course is specifically designed for developers with little programming experience. While it is for absolute beginners, core concepts in C# are required according to Microsoft.
The company recommends its free C# for Absolute Beginners course to users who have no C# programming experience. It is highly suggested to start with the C# course to learn core concepts of the language if you have never worked with it before.
The 80 lessons of the Windows 10 development course walk users through the app creation process on the Universal Windows Platform beginning with basics such as what XAML is to the creation of several Windows apps throughout the course.
Universal apps will run on all devices running or supporting Windows 10 including PCs, phones, tablets but also Microsoft's Xbox or HoloLens.
The course is divided into two major parts. The first teaches basic skills to create apps for Windows while the second the creation of four applications and advanced concepts such as using APIs or submitting apps to Windows Store.
The four applications that you will create during the course are:
- A soundboard application to play sounds when users tap on tiles.
- A weather application making external API calls.
- An album cover match game which accesses folders on the operating system.
- A hero explorer app using Marvel's programmatic API.
While each lesson consists mostly of leaning back, exercises are added to challenge students to improve problem solving skills and improve familiarity with the development environment and the concepts taught in the course.
As far as requirements are concerned, users need to have access to Windows 10 to create apps for the platform and use Visual Studio 2015 as the development environment (the free Visual Studio 2015 Community Edition is recommended specifically in the course).
The source code for all lessons of the course have been uploaded to Github.
Developers who have previous experience may want to check out the Developer's Guide to Windows 10 instead which is faster paced than the beginner's course.
Hey, is there any workaround to install on external hard disk? I have low space on my current disk around 11 GB.
Nice. Is there something like this for Android?
Yes this one: https://www.udacity.com/course/android-development-for-beginners–ud837
Not everything is free in that course though but several lessons are.