Recently there is an explosion in the online courses for higher education. It’s a great chance for people looking for comprehensive academic classes. I started with a bunch of these classes but time proved that I should have selected wisely. Because they are not fluffy little tutorials. You really have to take the time to watch the videos, take the exams and hand in the assignments. So here are the ones that I find useful mixed with some of the older resources I used for similar purposes.

Udacity is one of my favourites. It’s very forgiving about the deadlines. It uses Youtube extensively. You can even take the quizes and answer questions right on the video and submit your results. It has very nice courses including Applied Cryptography and Artificial Intelligence.

Coursera has a ton of Stanford classes like Cryptography, Machine Learning and Computer Networks. I had started Machine Learning course when it was in sort of a beta phase and was running on ml-class.org. Princeton university offers nice computer science classes as well under this site.

I don’t know if this was a beta site but it offers only one class by MIT: Circuits and Electronics. More about MIT courses below…

edX has a small but quality selection of courses from MIT, Harvard and Berkeley. Software as a Service and Artificial Intelligence courses from Berkeley look delicious.

I personally haven’t tried this site but heard from a friend. From the looks of it I think they have mostly old material. They have some video courses from Stanford which I had seen a few years ago from iTunesU. Still it may worth keeping an eye on.

iTunesU was a gold mine in my eyes when I first discovered it. Watching course from Stanford while commuting was a great way making good use of time. Now the more interactive courses overshadowed it but it’s not dead yet. Far from it. Apple released an iTunesU app which allows to download your favourite courses very easily.

Frankly I’m not a big fan it. Compared to the rest it has rather simple and entry-level tutorials. But still shoulders an important mission and helps a lot of people get some valuable resources so I thought it’s worth mentioning.

Resources

• Daphne Koller’s TED talk about online education

I’ve been using my own domain in my home network for a few years now but I hadn’t tried Windows Server Update Services (WSUS) until recently. After re-organizing my network, I ended up having almost 20 virtual machines. Since most of them are running various flavours of Windows, keeping them up-to-date became an issue. That’s when I recalled the existence of WSUS. What it does is basically allowing you to download Windows updates on one of your own servers and then distributing them to other machines over LAN. So no more downloading 300M of service packs over and over again.

Installing WSUS is quite easy. You just have to open server manager and add the Windows Server Update Services role.

Then you can select for which products you want to download updates. And also what types of updates you want to download.

The most tricky part is enforcing the client machines in the domain to download the updates from your server. That goal is achieved by Group Policy Management. TechNet has a nice article describing the necessary actions: http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc708574(WS.10).aspx

Normally, its target is not home users obviously. But after I’ve seen the benefits of it, I strongly recommend it to anyone running his own domain.

I was planning to play around with Visual Studio Lightswitch for a while. Finally, I could spare some time. For me the best way of learning is by doing so before I started playing I had to imagine a project first.

To find an appropriate project of course we have analyse what Lightswitch is and is it good for: In a nutshell, Visual Studio Lightswitch is a fast and easy way to develop data-driven Line-of-Business (LOB) applications. As a developer, I am generally not very fond of such tools because they impose many limitations whereas while writing code we have unlimited freedom. But I also hate wasting time with boiler-plate code. Creating add/edit/search screens for some entities is such a trivial and boring task. Such forms should always be  generated by a tool to sustain consistency. Otherwise, especially in large applications and organizations. By the way, this reminded me the one of the worst forms I have ever seen in a Microsoft application. It’s the reporting form in Team Foundation Server 2010 as shown below. Even the tabs in the same form are inconsistent. But, I digress! Let’s move on.

For a long time I was looking for an nice open-source software to manage my movie collection. I tried a few but couldn’t exactly find what I wanted. So while trying to find a project idea I decided to create a simple movie manager application. It’s mainly data entry and search so it sounded an ideal project type for Lightswitch.

The result was amazing! Not that I created a complex and fully-functioning application but within minutes I had a simple database and two forms to enter movie and director information and a movie search form.

The screens are customizable but the even the default templates create very satisfying results. They cover all the basic needs for data entry, validation and search. So having a such tool in my arsenal and always preferring to develop my own software instead of using someone else’s I decided to develop my movie and TV show management program with Lightswitch. Thinking this is only version 1.0, I think there’s great potential in it for there are so many applications to develop but not enough time.