If you are not already aware, you can get a very useful 'Developer account' called 'Visual Studio Dev Essentials' from Microsoft that gives you $25/month free credit on Azure. If you are careful, this is more than enough to allow you to play around and learn everything you need before committing to spending any money. The only thing you need to do is give them your credit card number so if you *do* go over your limit you can pay. But that's not what this heads-up is about! Actually, it's about a very cool extra benefit that some people seem to have missed.
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Often, when you sign up for a service like 'Dev Essentials', they link with other selected partners to offer customers added value, giving you additional reasons to stick around and keep using the service. Its an old trick, but one that usually benefits the end user (that's you and me in this case!). In this case, the good folk at Microsoft have partnered with the other good folk at Pluralsight to offer a full six months totally free, no strings attached training account. If you are not aware of Pluralsight, it is one of the leading paid sites for online training for technical professionals. I have used it on and off for a good while and find it very useful. The courses on offer range from very narrow to very broad topics, and the standard of teaching is generally good.![]()
As part of the current training offer, the program is giving a list of benefits, which include:
Free access to technical training from industry leaders such as Pluralsight, Wintellect, and Xamarin and priority support on MSDN forums.
- Pluralsight (3-month subscription)— for limited time only 6 month
- Selected Xamarin University courses on-demand
- WintellectNOW (3-month subscription)
- Microsoft Virtual Academy
- HackHands Live Programming Help ($25 credit)
- Priority Forum Support
Naturally the benefits come with restrictions, and most important, are subject to time limited availability!
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So this is where you need to pay attention ... as of the time of writing this article, the Pluralsight benefits is extended from the normal 3 months, to a really generous 6 months. Not only that, but at the moment, it seems to be at the pro version level, not just basic. This means that you can use the Pluralsight mobile app to download training videos and watch them offline when you have time.
This is a really good offer, and I urge you to jump on it now, and get yourself some of that free training goodness while it lasts - which may not be for long once the good word gets out!
To avail of the offer, go to VS Dev Essentials, click the Join Now button, and follow it through.
Get learning,
Get coding :)