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Microsoft Doubles Down on Instructional Videos: Xamarin and Python

After Microsoft's Scott Hanselman introduced a bunch of new beginner-level instructional videos for .NET, Xamarin guru James Montemagno wanted to remind mobile developers that similar resources are available for them.

"Last week Hanselman announced all of the great new videos that are available at dot.net/videos," Montemagno said in a post. "However, he forgot to mention that there is an entire new getting started series for iOS & Android development with Xamarin!"

That 11-part series, produced by Matt Soucoup and Brandon Minnick, is joined by a C# 101 video series.

Available on both YouTube and Microsoft's Channel 9 video site, the new Xamarin videos range from "What is Xamarin" to "Xamarin.Forms UI with XAML (and with C#)."

XXamarin VideosXX
[Click on image for larger view.] Xamarin Videos (source: Microsoft).

What's more, Microsoft's open source blog last month announced a new video series for beginners to learn Python programming. A YouTube playlist of 44 videos ranges from "Programming with Python" to JSON to "Managing Keys."

The Python videos were announced by senior program manager Christopher Harrison and produced with Susan Ibach.

"While we won't cover everything there is to know about Python in the course, we want to make sure we give you the foundation on programming in Python, starting from common everyday code and scenarios.," Harrison said. "At the end of the course, you'll be able to go and learn on your own, following along docs, tutorials, books, etc. We promise we're keeping things quick and to the point, so you can dive straight into the areas that you're most interest in (or confused by!)."

Although Python might seem an incongruous subject for Microsoft-centric coders, the company has gone all in on Python on the Visual Studio Code side of things, and the Python extension in the VS Code Marketplace is the No. 1 offering by far.

About the Author

David Ramel is an editor and writer at Converge 360.

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