Training Discovery

Discover how to work with Entity Framework Core, the popular tool for object-relational mapping (ORM). In this course—the second installment in the Entity Framework Core Essential Training series—learn about persisting data back to the data store, different DbContext options, and how to configure the DbContext. Instructor Phil Japikse covers tracking EntityState, sharing a transaction between two different DbContexts, navigating the batching process, and working with detached entities. He also goes into connection resiliency, how the OnConfiguring method works, how to create a custom execution strategy, and more.

If you're comfortable with FileMaker basics, you're ready for the next step. Learn tips, tricks, and advanced techniques for FileMaker 17—the latest version of the FileMaker platform used all around the world. FileMaker expert Cris Ippolite reveals solutions to maximize your efficiency and make your FileMaker apps more dynamic and sophisticated. Explore advanced techniques using scripts, calculations, reports, and layouts. In addition, you can explore important security tips and learn the publishing options offered by FileMaker Server, including FileMaker WebDirect. Cris also shows you how to connect to other databases and exchange data with APIs using JSON code.

Developers face an array of challenges when trying to develop performant applications for Microsoft SQL Server. In this course, instructor Joey D'Antoni shares concepts and strategies that can help you enhance your app's performance on SQL Server. Throughout this course, Joey walks through best practices for building efficient, scalable database applications. He covers an array of topics, including execution plans, columnstore indexes, datatypes, temporary objects, and what not to do with SQL Server. He also goes over indexing, and shares how best to create temporary objects.

Succession planning ensures that there are highly qualified people in all of your mission critical positions—not just today, but tomorrow, next year, and five years from now. These rich talent review sessions help leaders understand their current bench strength and make plans for improvement. In this course, learn the step-by-step process for implementing and facilitating a robust succession planning process. Discover how to build an approach that will allow your organization to keep its leadership pipeline full and flowing. Having the right people in the right places will ensure that your talent is your competitive advantage.

Toon Boom Harmony is used by the best animation studios in the world. To qualify for highly competitive jobs in TV, film, and gaming, students need to master the tools and the complete production process of this powerful animation software. In this course, animator Dermot O' Connor shows how to use Toon Boom Harmony to create hand-drawn and digital animation, complex character rigs, and even some cool special effects. He walks through the Toon Boom Harmony interface, introduces the program's drawing tools and color controls, and teaches techniques for drawing keys, breakdowns, and in-betweens in a traditional animation style, as well as creating motion- and morph-tweened digital animations. Then he shows how to set up, rig, and animate a character, and add finishing touches to your animations, such as moving cameras and sound. Plus, learn to export your work as movies and image sequences.

Like all JavaScript-based technologies, TypeScript is changing rapidly as it grows. This course introduces the new kinds of types and the approaches to interacting with them, as well as other features of this rapidly evolving scripting language. Instructor Emmanuel Henri shows how to take advantage of the latest features in TypeScript, as well as critical updates from previous versions, such as type tagging, generators and iterators, and control flow analysis. By the end of the course, even well-versed TypeScript programmers will have found something new to add to their daily workflow.

Interactivity is key to seeing how architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) designs will perform in the real world. Unity provides a powerful toolset for adding interactivity and making AEC visualizations more dynamic. Join George Maestri in this course to learn how to use Unity scripting, animation, and UI tools to enhance the interactivity of your designs. Review the basics of scripting, including working with variables and functions. Learn to apply scripts directly to objects in your scene and trigger them with a single keystroke. Next, discover how to animate interactions, such as opening doors and drawers, and adjust how animations are triggered with colliders and proximity detection. Finally, George shows how to create a simple user interface for your scene, adding buttons, menus, and sliders that allow the viewer to control object visibility, lighting levels, and more.

How do you create authentic, sincere portraits that capture the essence of people? A lot of it comes down to post-production. Using Adobe Photoshop and Lightroom, Chris Orwig walks us through three start-to-finish, up-close portrait projects: a portrait of a legend, a portrait of an artist, and a portrait of a celebrity. He explains the common foundation for the shots—a natural style, setting, and lighting—and explains how to zero in on the best image from a collection. He shows how to enhance each portrait with Lightroom and Photoshop, combining black-and-white adjustments with creative cropping, retouching, and color and tone enhancements. He recaps the editing process for each portrait, and closes with some ideas to integrate in your own workflow.

Emergency and fire-protection systems are important to get right. This course covers the basics of creating detailed sprinkler and fire-alarm drawings for a variety of spaces, with AutoCAD. Start by adding custom display configurations and room tags that update automatically, and then quickly jump into creating fire piping and sprinkler heads. Finally, learn how to place fire-alarm devices, control panels, and conduit.

As a professional designer, you have the creativity needed to tackle video production—you just need to learn the tools and processes. In this course, instructor Tony Harmer helps you build upon the skills covered in the first installment of Video and Audio for Designers with Creative Cloud. Here, Tony builds on the nuts and bolts of video and audio production, specifically for designers who have to produce in these mediums for their jobs, or are being asked to learn these skills. Most visual designers have some basic skills that translate to working with video and sound. Here, Tony speaks their language, translating potentially foreign terms and concepts into ones that designers may find more familiar. He goes over how to build a title sequence, work with motion graphic templates, clean up audio, and more. Throughout the course, he covers how to work with After Effects, Premiere, and Audition as he steps through the creation of a video intended for social sharing.

Accelerate web applications with native code using WebAssembly. WebAssembly is a new, revolutionary technology that allows developers to program webpages using popular high-level languages like C, C++, Rust, and Python. Code is then compiled to WebAssembly bytecode and implemented by the JavaScript engine built into all web browsers. You gain flexibility and functionality without sacrificing performance. This course focuses on the practical uses of the technology: converting C and C++ code to WebAssembly and executing WebAssembly in JavaScript. Programmer and engineer Matt Scarpino demonstrates the power of the WebAssembly, implementing quick sort and matrix multiplication algorithms. He also reviews advanced features, such as debugging and the WebAssembly text format. By the end of the course, you'll understand the massive potential WebAssembly represents and be ready to implement it in your next web project.

Learn the essentials of the Windows operating system, including the new features in Windows 10 April 2018 Update. Nick Brazzi shows how to use core bundled apps that come with Windows 10, manage files and folders, browse the web, and work with mail, calendar, and contacts. Want to customize Windows 10? Learn how to find and install new apps from the Windows Store, and adjust your display preferences and account settings so your PC works perfectly for you. Finally, find out how to back up and restore Windows in case of computer failure, recover missing files, and use built-in tools to protect yourself against malware, such as viruses and spyware.

Losing files is terrible for anyone but losing animation-work that you've spent 500 or 1,000 hours on-can be crippling. In this course, David Andrade introduces a production workflow that will help you mitigate disasters and get projects done on time. He covers the creative and technical aspects of animation, including scripting, storyboarding, layout, file management, and rendering. Each step is shown in context in the production pipeline, allowing you to see how software like After Effects, Maya, and Blender fit together. Use the pipeline to solve your unique creative and technical challenges and develop a customized production workflow to suit your personal style.

Not all CAD packages excel at the same tasks. But moving models between them can be difficult. In this course, you can learn a workflow for moving models between ZBrush and CAD packages that use SubD (subdivision surfaces), such as Rhino. Instructor Jean Gorospe shows how to build incredible designs that take advantage of both their strengths-and prepare for an exciting 3D printing process known as stereolithography (SLA). Follow along and discover how to build a modern task chair in Rhino, transfer the model to ZBrush for high-res detailing, send the mesh back to Rhino to convert it to NURBs, and finalize the design for printing. Jean even shows you what the results look like coming straight off an SLA printer, and after they've been washed and cured.

The digital revolution has altered what it means to be a good leader. Today's leaders must be able to respond as quickly as technology changes—or risk being left behind. This course teaches adaptive project leadership techniques to help you keep up with the pace of change. It covers strategies and skills such as lean product management, adaptive thinking, and agile leadership. Instructor Kelley O'Connell shows how to better understand the customer journey, how to adopt an adaptive mindset, how to manage virtual teams, and how to create a culture of continuous learning and growth. These lessons will help you communicate and collaborate better across the entire organization, deliver products and projects that exceed changing expectations, and stand out as a leader in the digital age.

Affinity Photo is a powerful but approachable image enhancement program that is being embraced by a growing number of photographers. In this course, instructor Steve Caplin covers advanced techniques that can help experienced users get more out of this powerful photo app. Steve goes beyond the essentials, explaining how to restore hazy images, work with advanced blending controls, convert images to black and white, sharpen the edges of an image, and more. Plus, he shares how to boost your productivity by setting your own keyboard shortcuts and creating macros.

A diverse and fascinating array of factors influence even the simplest buying decisions. Understanding the driving forces behind why your customers buy from you—or opt for a competitor's product—can empower you to reach key consumers. In this course, join thought leader Michael Solomon as he takes a deep dive into the internal and external forces that influence consumer behavior.

First, learn the importance of consumer behavior in helping us understand when, why, and how purchasing decisions are made. Michael shares how factors such as color, shape, and sound influence our perception of brands and products. He discusses gender identity and products geared towards different genders, as well as how consumer lifestyles, values, and attitudes affect product preferences. Michael also goes into external influences on consumer behavior, covering how groups make decisions and how ideas spread. Finally, Michael explores the role emotion plays in purchase decisions, and how you can structure messages to maximize persuasion.

Develop your Python programming skills. Python is a great choice for building all kinds of applications, but to fully take advantage of its power and flexibility, you need to master all its advanced functionality. In this course, you can learn how to leverage next-level Python features such as object-oriented special class methods, use logging to track performance and user activity, see how to port code from Python 2 to 3, and make your code more efficient and easier to read and maintain. Instructor Joe Marini also shows how to manipulate data, build custom classes and functions, create lists, and write more elegant, optimized code.

Become a Bluebeam pro. Bluebeam is a robust suite of software for working with PDF documents in the architecture, engineering, and construction (AEC) industries. These tips and tricks can help you use Bluebeam more effectively and become an expert at managing your projects in a paperless environment. Industry expert Jim Rogers offers an ever-growing list of tips and tricks that will help you speed up your workflow and use new features like dynamic properties.

Learn how to work smarter in Microsoft Dynamics 365. In this advanced course, instructor Gini von Courter dives into using reports, charts, and dashboards to influence business workflows and share the data story inside Dynamics. Gini steps through how to create, modify, manage, and share reports. She also discusses how to create and modify charts and dashboards, use a system template, create Excel templates for Dynamics, and more.

Authentication and authorization are core features of many modern apps. So why reinvent the wheel, forcing your users to create yet another login? Leveraging credentials from trusted platforms like Facebook and Google, you can save yourself precious development time and improve the user experience. This course shows how to authenticate and authorize users of your ASP.NET MVC 5 applications using .NET methods as well as third-party frameworks. Instructor Ervis Trupja discusses the options for identity management in ASP.NET MVC 5, showing how to implement third-party authentication in your app with Facebook, Twitter, Google, Microsoft, and GitHub. He shows how to set up email confirmation and two-step authentication and control levels of authorization for users. Finally, he discusses how to secure ASP.NET apps against the seven most common vulnerabilities.

ASP.NET MVC provides great features and functionality out of the box, but there's more you can do to optimize your code. Learn how to build applications for long-term productivity and maintainability by streamlining your views, controllers, and models, in this deep dive course from Jess Chadwick. Discover how to separate application and business logic, reuse and simplify views, manage dependencies, reduce markup with HTML helpers, and apply patterns to increase productivity and simplify controller logic. Plus, learn how to take advantage of feature folders, which groups all necessary controllers, views, and models for a feature within a single folder, reducing navigation and search time and enabling feature scaling and code reuse.

Autodesk Inventor has a set of intelligent tools intended to make it easier to iterate and automate product design. These features allow users to quickly develop new variations of a design, without "reinventing" it every time. Learn how to use the power of Inventor to build logic and iterations into your 3D designs. Discover how to add simple parameters to your models, reuse data with iFeatures, streamline assembly creation with iMates, create variations on parts with differing sizes and materials with iParts, and build dynamic assembly configurations with iAssemblies. Plus, learn how to configure rule-driven product design with iLogic. Instructor Nathan Eliason discusses best practices for each method, so you get the best performance from each toolset.

You may already be familiar with platform as a service (PaaS), but this course takes you further by teaching you how to work with several of the serverless options available in Azure. First, Mike Benkovich explains serverless computing. Next, he introduces you to stream analytics, Event Hubs, advanced queries, and functions. Follow along in the demo apps to practice IoT provisioning, provisioning an ASA job, and more.

As a leader, you're expected to do more than just manage people. Your employees and colleagues look to you as a subject matter expert, a coach, an agent of change, and more. In this course, leadership expert Sara Canaday dives into the different roles leaders play—from manager to motivator—and shares strategies that can help you effectively balance them for greater success. Discover how to assess what each of your leadership roles require and move seamlessly between each one.