Dear Sirs,
I have purchased Microsoft e-learning collection 6463 (Visual Studio 2008 ASP.NET 3.5) in order to prepare for exam 70-562.
The courses look like a technology playing field, but the information contained in the courses is not up with the information imparted by a good book (while the costs of a good book is about 20% of the costs of a Microsoft e-learning course).
However what really frustrates me are the online labs.
Here is a couple of the problems I am encountering with online labs:
- I frequently encounter problems where I am loosing connection to a lab. I was never able to reconnect to the lab after that.
- When accidentally pressing the backspace key while the "Lab instructions" pane has the focus (consider you want to delete a character in the IDE but previously accessed the Lab instructions) then the browser navigates to the previous page which causes the connection to the lab to be lost (results in Error 1009).
- Round trips are bad. When pressing a key it takes up to one second before the display changes. Moreover the virtual PCs also seem to be pretty slow.
- While my preferred language is English, my PC has a German keyboard layout. Even when changing the Keyboard setting in the Regional Settings of the Labs virtual PC to German I am unable to enter special characters like "@", because the <Alt Gr> key does not work.
- Labs are using an antiquarian screen resolution of 800x600. I am used to work with 1920x1200. Working with 800x600 is totally inconvenient.
I do not want to waste any more time with Microsoft e-learning online labs. Please let me know if the starter files contained in the labs can be downloaded anywhere so that I may perform the labs on my local development environment (which I have paid good money for to Microsoft).
Thanks and kind regards
Sebastian Daser
Softfount IT Solutions
