Options for SharePoint 2010 developer training?

Question

What are my options for solid, relevant and affordable training for SharePoint 2010 development? I am working with a relatively small budget and would also have to do this on my own time, so it would need to be flexible.

Answer 1

Before you do any training I would strongly suggest you look at the MSDN SharePoint Developer Center and the SharePoint Learning site especially. They have a ton of great content and hours of videos from Microsoft professionals and MVPs. There's vids from Teched 2010,

Download the Information Worker VM, which you can use to practice with (comes with Visual Studio installed).

Last but not least, checkout the free Critical Path webinars coming up over the next few weeks & months.

Edit: I meant to say Before you pay for any training

Answer 2

You should start with Microsoft's SharePoint training at:
Microsoft SharePoint Developer Learning Center
It pretty much covers all the basics.

Once you are done there are plenty of books that offer very good training, for example:

• Beginning SharePoint 2010 Development
• Microsoft SharePoint 2010: Building Solutions for SharePoint 2010

And since SharePoint is a huge platform you should decide what you want to cover in more depth: be it branding and design, BCS, InfoPath etc.

Answer 3

To give a rather left-field answer; formal training is not always the best solution for everyone. I much prefer to learn by doing, rather than reading about doing.

That said, it never hurts to have at least an outline of what you can do with SharePoint. With that in mind, I'd recommend reviewing the 70-573 syllabus to get an idea of what can be done.

Once you've got an idea of what's possible, go try something out! If you get stuck, then MSDN is an absolute goldmine of a resource.

Hopefully this at least ticks the "cheap" requirement.

Answer 4

In addition to the great answers that have been posted so far, downloading the SDK and keeping it handy on your laptop is always a good idea. Also, I've recently come to appreciate the book SharePoint 2010 Development with Visual Studio 2010 (Microsoft .NET Development Series) by Carter, Scholl, and Jausovec. It fills in the blanks in areas where that other books I read may have missed.