I was not very active on the blog in the past month and I did not create YouTube videos either. The reason for this is that I worked on a new course. I thought it would be a good idea to take a moment and summarize this in a post. Btw, if you are interested, you can get the course via this link with a giant discount.
About the course
This is my second online course and it is basically a continuation of my last one: “High performance coding with .NET Core and C#”. Already during the creation of that course, I had a bunch of topics that weren’t performance related, so I had to drop them from the course. Therefore, already during the creation of the first course I thought it would be great to create a course where I can cover advanced .NET topics like CLR internals, object finalization and GC internals, a lot more about the ref keyword (e.g. its implementation), struct layout, and a bunch of similar things that are super interesting.
Additionally, I always think that reading the ECMA-335 specification gives a bunch of information about how things work. Just by knowing a few things from ECMA-335 makes someone a much better .NET developer. I wanted to make a course where I cover topics that are covered in ECMA-335 and I also wanted to show within the course what ECMA-335 says about those specific topics.
On top of this within my “.NET Concept of the week” series I also had a bunch of topics that would also fit into such a course.
So, I did it! This new course is exactly what I described above.
Facts
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Topic: Everything beyond a typical “advanced C# course”. For example Object finalization, IDisposable vs. Finalizer, Struct layout, ref keyword, managed pointers in the CLR, a bunch of things from ECMA-335, and similar things.
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Course length: ~1,5 hours
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Where did I publish the course: It’s here on Udemy
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Length of the course creation process: 1 month
There are two topics from the course that I also cover in my “.NET Concept of the week” series, and these are 1) Struct layout and 2) Exception filters. Those are public videos on Udemy, so you can watch them both on YouTube and on Udemy. The remaining content is Udemy-only.
What changed compared to the first course?
First of all, I fell in love with animations and sound effects. I hope I don’t overuse it, but in this course, every time something moves there is a sound effect to it, and I love it!
I truly believe that this style ads value, since these sound effects help to catch changes on the screen.
Another thing is music. I wanted to make sure that the delivery of the course is more engaging. Every video starts with a short intro with background music, and then we jump either to Visual Studio or to the Slides&Animations if there is some theoretical background that I must cover.
Plus this course also contains quizzes at the end of each section.
My setup is still the same, except this time I used a pop filter, so I didn’t have to edit out pops manually. That ~10EUR for the pop filter was a very good investment.
On top of that I think (...and I hope I’m not the only one who thinks this) after 1 year in this “video creation business” the overall quality increased. My narration became better, I’m also better with editing, and so on. I also learned how to control the length of my videos. Based on studies the optimal video length within a course is somewhere between 5 and 10 minutes and this time I was much better with making sure that I don’t create 20 minutes long giant videos. Now all of these things are very subjective and of course I’m not the one who should judge this. We will see what the audience thinks! That is much more important.
What’s next?
The course title allows basically infinite content within such a course. The plan is to extend it with new topics regularly. In the intro I say that I’m happy to take suggestions from the audience, and I mean this seriously: if someone comes up with a topic that fits the course I will make new videos on it.
Additionally, I also have my own list that could fit into the course. So this is kind of an open ended course that will be updated regularly with new topics.