Microsoft

How QA developed a bespoke training course to enable developers who are already skilled in J2EE to migrate to .NET – or use both technologies together.

The Challenge

When Microsoft launched the .NET framework and its development tools, the company was keen to demonstrate .NET’s advantages over the already mainstream development solution, Java 2 Platform, Enterprise Edition (J2EE).

The part of Microsoft responsible for helping developers and organisations to understand and adopt its technologies, the Developer and Platform Evangelism group, wanted to show developers across Europe how .NET applications could be used alongside, integrate with or replace J2EE applications. Microsoft chose QA to develop and deliver a high-level training course, specifically to achieve this aim.

The Solution

For Microsoft, QA was a natural choice. Not only is QA one of the leading providers of Microsoft technical training, the company has developed world-class knowledge in many leading-edge areas of development, including J2EE and, of course, .NET.

QA worked with Microsoft to define the structure of the course, and its target audience. The course would be highly technical - aimed at top-tier ‘expert’ developers.

It was decided to build the course around the development of a real-world application – an Xbikes on-line store. This ensured that the course – although highly technical – dealt with real issues in a practical way. During the four-day course, the entire Xbikes application would be built, using a mixture of J2EE and .NET.

Intensive in nature, the course took a team of QA’s developers almost four months to create, and represented the very latest thinking in application development and interoperability between Java and .NET. Unusually but logically, the course required two top-level instructors to deliver it – one an expert in J2EE and one an expert in .NET. This ensured not only the accuracy of information, but also impartiality – and that obscure or low-level questions could be answered in depth.

The course showed how people with J2EE skills could migrate Java applications to .NET, or create .NET applications which work seamlessly with current Java applications, so that previous development investment didn’t have to be discarded.

QA delivered the course across the UK and Europe, to over a hundred chief developers from leading organisations and top systems integration companies. Microsoft was so impressed with the course that the Xbikes application and workshop has become a standard download for developers at the Microsoft’s own on-line Developer Network (MSDN).