Angular/Breeze course on PluralSight "requires" Visual Studio and ASP.Net

[Keith Rowland]

I'm not actually complaining about the requirements, just that no one can tell these requirements exist until they join PluralSight. I've included the Title and Description below. Even in the list of video titles there is no reference to anything concerning Visual Studio or .Net technology and there are a lot of video titles! (Well, it does reference HotTowel in one section but who knows what the heck that is?)  This seems intentional. Only when you start watching the videos, something you must sign up and pay to do, you find out the backend is entirely MS asp.net and for any automated builds one needs Visual Studio and NuGet. I don't understand this omission/deception (at least I hope I don't). I thought PS was opening up to the open source community in buying Peepcode but then they create a course by slapping this proprietary backend on an Angular stack and provide no other alternative to take the course without paying for MS products. Actually you could take it using a pure OS stack, but the student would need to create an alternative backend and create a new build process.

As far as the course itself goes, it appears to be a very good course sans the MS stuff. 

See below, where is the mention of the VS and .Net requirements in the information for the course? Peruse the course topics, nothing mentioned except for HotTowel. It turns out HotTowel is a NuGet pkg for building an Angular app in Visual Studio. PluralSight would be better served to represent this course more accurately. John Papa, the creator, says he asked PluralSight to correct the course information, but nothing so far. 

Course URL:

http://pluralsight.com/training/courses/TableOfContents?courseName=build-apps-angular-breeze

Title: Building Apps with Angular and Breeze. -  Build a Single Page Application (SPA) from scratch using JavaScript, Angular, and Breeze.

Description: "Build a Single Page Application (SPA) from scratch using JavaScript, Angular, and Breeze. Learn how to combine the Angular presentation framework, rich data features of Breeze, and raw features of JavaScript, CSS, and HTML5 to create robust modern web applications." 

I for one want to help keep open source as open as possible. Google has done the community a great service for supporting AngluarJS development, even if it's a good business strategy to do so. I wonder if it would be good for the Angular community to create an alternative backend for this course based on the MEAN stack or something else and toss it up on github so all could benefit from this course? I would lend a hand in doing that. Other than the Visual Studio build and asp.net backend, all else seems pure Angular and Breeze. If there is some MS shenanigans going on, it was released just a month before Halloween :), http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Halloween_Documents, the best way for the open source community to combat it is to just keep being their giving and sharing selves. 

Thanks goes to John Papa for creating what appears to be a very good and thorough course.

Cheers,
KR

[Randall Meeker]

PluralSight does have pretty good free trial. 

[Alec Whittington]

The express line of developer tools from MS are free, so there is no need to purchase anything. Also, you can easily change out the back-end stack with what you prefer, it just might not be covered in the tutorial. Sorry, just pointing out the obvious.

[Keith Rowland]

My complaint is that the requirements to use a .Net backend and Visual Studio is not expressly stated anywhere in the course title or description. It appears as if it's fully open source training when it's actually not. A student needs Windows to take the course as designed and it's certainly not obvious from anything I can see in the course description. PluralSight is now marketing to the open source community and many of those new students are Linux/OSX based. It seems to me PS needs to be clear which courses are easily completed on those platforms and which will need Windows. Sure students can swap out a backend, or find some other build process than is provided in the course, but if that extra work is needed they should be able to glean that from the course description.

[Alec Whittington]

I don't disagree with your complaint. Having been a long time Pluralsight user, I have faith Aaron will get the ball rolling in updating system requirements for each video series. The only exception I took to your original post was the fact you are required developer tools, which as I pointed out there are free versions.

As far as the open source piece goes, I would suspect that many open source topics will be recorded by many of their current authors and that they will still have a somewhat MS tooling focus. As time goes on, I am sure that will decrease.

Lastly, with regards to MS tooling, it is no where near as bad as everything will lead you to believe. There are more of us bootcamp developers everyday. Personally I write most of my windows apps in VS 2012 or VS 2013 even though I do not need to. I enjoy the IDE and plugins such as ReSharper. When I am in OS X, I use WebStorm or Sublime and I miss VS every moment. Is it perfect? No, but please show me something tangibly better. I've run both WebStorm in Windows and OS X, it is a great tool but way too slow for me. Most likely a Java engine issue. As far as stacks go, mine looks like this:

• MS ASP.NET MVC
• Angular
• ServiceStack for API
• MS SQL, MySQL, or MongoDB
  

Some are SPA's, most are separate angular apps broken down by section or feature in a normal MVC project. I'd like to hear what stack is and the whys, pros cons. I'm always up for seeing how someone else does it, makes us all better.

Keith Rowland

Thursday, November 14, 2013 11:12 AM

My complaint is that the requirements to use a .Net backend and Visual Studio is not expressly stated anywhere in the course title or description. It appears as if it's fully open source training when it's actually not. A student needs Windows to take the course as designed and it's certainly not obvious from anything I can see in the course description. PluralSight is now marketing to the open source community and many of those new students are Linux/OSX based. It seems to me PS needs to be clear which courses are easily completed on those platforms and which will need Windows. Sure students can swap out a backend, or find some other build process than is provided in the course, but if that extra work is needed they should be able to glean that from the course description.

On Thursday, November 14, 2013 6:33:31 AM UTC-8, Alec Whittington wrote:

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Alec Whittington

Thursday, November 14, 2013 7:33 AM

The express line of developer tools from MS are free, so there is no need to purchase anything. Also, you can easily change out the back-end stack with what you prefer, it just might not be covered in the tutorial. Sorry, just pointing out the obvious.

On Wednesday, November 13, 2013 3:46:06 PM UTC-7, Keith Rowland wrote:

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[Keith Rowland]

Please don't think I'm complaining about Visual Studio or .Net. And no, I can't show you anything better than Visual Studio at all. I try different IDEs and would really like to learn from VS the .Net framework. From everything I've read I think Visual Studio would be my IDE of choice if I were on Windows, but I just have not had a good experience with Windows and I really do love *nix. If the MS dev stack were available for OSX or Linux I would dig into it, but as it is I don't want to run a vm and buy Windows to be just able to do that. Currently I use a combination of Sublime, Webstorm, and shell tools. In some ways I'm glad there's not just one obvious IDE in the unix world. I think it spawns innovation to have a plurality of choices and not one dominant IDE, even if it also creates annoyances. 

I see the MS and open source dev camps overlapping more and more. It's a good thing for all us code monkeys.

On Thursday, November 14, 2013 10:33:23 AM UTC-8, Alec Whittington wrote:

I don't disagree with your complaint. Having been a long time Pluralsight user, I have faith Aaron will get the ball rolling in updating system requirements for each video series. The only exception I took to your original post was the fact you are required developer tools, which as I pointed out there are free versions.

As far as the open source piece goes, I would suspect that many open source topics will be recorded by many of their current authors and that they will still have a somewhat MS tooling focus. As time goes on, I am sure that will decrease.

Lastly, with regards to MS tooling, it is no where near as bad as everything will lead you to believe. There are more of us bootcamp developers everyday. Personally I write most of my windows apps in VS 2012 or VS 2013 even though I do not need to. I enjoy the IDE and plugins such as ReSharper. When I am in OS X, I use WebStorm or Sublime and I miss VS every moment. Is it perfect? No, but please show me something tangibly better. I've run both WebStorm in Windows and OS X, it is a great tool but way too slow for me. Most likely a Java engine issue. As far as stacks go, mine looks like this:

• MS ASP.NET MVC
• Angular
• ServiceStack for API
• MS SQL, MySQL, or MongoDB
  

Some are SPA's, most are separate angular apps broken down by section or feature in a normal MVC project. I'd like to hear what stack is and the whys, pros cons. I'm always up for seeing how someone else does it, makes us all better.

Keith Rowland

Thursday, November 14, 2013 11:12 AM

My complaint is that the requirements to use a .Net backend and Visual Studio is not expressly stated anywhere in the course title or description. It appears as if it's fully open source training when it's actually not. A student needs Windows to take the course as designed and it's certainly not obvious from anything I can see in the course description. PluralSight is now marketing to the open source community and many of those new students are Linux/OSX based. It seems to me PS needs to be clear which courses are easily completed on those platforms and which will need Windows. Sure students can swap out a backend, or find some other build process than is provided in the course, but if that extra work is needed they should be able to glean that from the course description.