Microsoft Innovation Center Brussels

Who am I?

My professional teacher career started at the Vrij Technisch Instituut Aalst in 1984 and I have been teaching in the Adult Education Centre of the same institute since 1987 (Centrum Volwassenen Onderwijs).

My first steps in programming was on CNC machines and welding robots, followed by QuickBasic en Visual Basic 3 to 6 and Visual Basic.NET. During the last 8 years I have used C# as programming language. Besides developing desktop applications with WPF, I let my students acquainted with Windows Phone 8.

Beside .NET courses, I also teach AutoCAD and Microsoft Office.

Furthermore, I’m a board member of the MADN (Metro App Development Network) user group. Its focus is to develop apps for Windows Phone and Windows Store Apps.

Courses taught over the years:

C#, WPF, Visual Basic.NET, ASP.NET, VBA, HTML 5, CSS, JavaScript, JQuery, PHP, MS SQL and MySQL

The necessity of constant training

These days technology changes at high speed, especially in the mobile phone sector. So as a developer I have to stay up-to-date with these new technologies. You can do this on different levels.

First line of education: Self-education

This can be accomplished by following blog posts of different authors in the field. Another useful source of information is the website of Microsoft Virtual Academy (http://www.microsoftvirtualacademy.com). MVA provides a lot of offline courses in all the different Microsoft technologies.

Twitter is also a good source to keep your finger on the pulse, because all the important technology experts are active on Twitter.

Second line of education: The developers Community

These are the different community user groups which all focus on a different technology. On regular basis they organize sessions with local or international speakers about different topics of a specific technology and you are then able to ask the speakers some questions.

MIC Brussels organized on a regular basis appathons, which give you the opportunity to develop apps for Windows 8 and Windows Phone under the guidance of experts in the field.

Third line of education: Through courses

The third line of education is following courses by a Microsoft Certified Center or at an Adult Education Centre. A Microsoft Certified Centre provides different courses in Microsoft technologies as a preparation for the Microsoft Certifications exams.

Adult Education Centres provide short courses, which result in an official certification. Some education centres provide long time courses leading up to a HBO 5 degree.

I recommend you, a (starting) developer, to combine the first and second line of education. But always keep in mind that sometimes the third line of education can make the difference.