Capt. Mondo's World o' Mondo-ness

Today I start a course in C#, courtesy of ATI. I have to admit, taking a course on C# programming, when the previous course I took was on Red Hat Linux, makes me feel a bit like I've gone over to the "dark side".

The course is course 2609: Introduction to C# Programming with Microsoft .NET, an official Microsoft course being taught at Polar Bear's location in North York. The instructor is Norman Handrigan, who is a Polar Bear instructor who has working with C# for over a year, and definitely knows his subject through and through, having worked with it in the field as well as having taught it. Other people in the class include a professional VB programmer, two system admins from Cadbury/Purina and a system admin from the Royal Bank.

It was nice this morning to not have to get up at an ungodly hour in order to get to the office, which was just as well since I have just started on a cold, and managed to sleep in a little bit this morning. I also got to see the girls just before leaving this morning, telling Vanessa that I was off to "my school", which she seemed to appreciate (not only kids go to school).

I am using a P4 1.7MHz machine that already has Visual Studio .NET already installed. The first class went well, though I found the first assignment we were set particularly hard -- we had skipped all of the previous intermediary steps, and in part I felt a bit lost when I got to a full-fledged assignment. Part of it was syntax (i.e. not knowing the language) but also because we weren't supplied with the underlying equations for creating an interest rate calculator. I was able to figure out the obligatory "Hello World" example though.

Having said that, the course is good, and the instructor is very personable, and open to questions of any sort, and often goes beyond the course material and talks about real-world experience.

On another point, it is nice to be going to a course that my manager and employing firm urged me to take, instead of either having had to pay for it myself, which has too often been the case at the previous firms I have worked at. A refreshing change.