It's been a busy month and we've made a lot of improvements to the MDFT Pro site in July. Here's a progress report of everything we added or changed.
More Microsoft courses!
We spent most of the summer uploading old recordings of Microsoft certification courses. We're using an automated video editing app to cut the recordings in the right place to create individual lessons. It's working nicely and we were able to upload a ton of new courses.
Here's what we have online so far:
- Fundamentals: AZ-900, DP-900, AI-900
- Associate: AZ-104, AI-103, AI-200, PL-300
- Expert: AZ-400
- Retired: DP-100, AZ-204, AI-050, DP-203
You can find the full list of courses here: https://mdftpro.com/courses.
Better course content
Two courses on MDFT Pro have all new content:
The C# Performance course (https://mdftpro.com/course/high-performance-csharp-code) has 108 new high-quality video recordings.
The Machine Learning with C# and ML.NET course (https://mdftpro.com/course/supervised-machine-learning-csharp-mlnet) has 63 new labs.
New: certification tracking
We added certification tracking, by storing the dates when you achieved your certifications or when you're planning to get the next one. Knowing these dates is useful because all Microsoft associate- and expert-level certifications must be renewed each year. MDFT Pro will now show renewal reminders at the 6-, 3- and 1-month interval with increasing levels of urgency.
I recently passed my DP-600 certification, and for the sake of debugging, I'm pretending to study for the AZ-104. So when I log in, MDFT Pro looks like this for me:
You can see that I passed the DP-600 in January (and don't have to renew it yet), and that I'm currently studying for the AZ-104. I have 54 days left until my exam, and I only completed 6% of the prep course.
In the future, we'll add a burndown chart comparing the remaining time with the amount of remaining work, and show a behind-schedule/on-schedule/ahead-of-schedule badge.
More free certification resources
We have 12 Microsoft certifications on the site right now, and you can see them here: https://mdftpro.com/certifications. For each exam, we link to the official study guide, a practice exam, the Microsoft exam info page, and the booking and renewal pages.
In the future, the certification page will remind you to renew your associate or expert certifications, or inform you if you're behind schedule on your studying.
Better skill proficiency tracking
We improved the performance of the proficiency tracking system on MDFT Pro by removing it from the typescript code and implementing it as a database function that runs every 15 minutes.
This way, the aggregated skill scores are always available and can be easily rendered into any page by the typescript code. Which means we can show progress bars literally everywhere.
MDFT Pro has a nice skill overview page that shows every certification exam with their corresponding skills: https://mdftpro.com/skills
This is how the page looks when I'm logged in:
You can see that every skill now has a progress bar. It's clear that I am most proficient in Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning, and my prep for the AI-900 certification is 23% done.
The full page shows 73 calculated skill proficiencies aggregated across 12 certifications and 9 courses. The old code would have brought this page to its knees, but with the new database function everything loads in a flash.
Progress bars also show up in other places. When you're viewing a specific course or certification, each skill card now has its own progress bar, like this:
Better subscriptions
We have three subscriptions for MDFT Pro, and we slightly tweaked them to make the differences more obvious:
Starter is for anyone who just wants to watch the videos and try the labs. But there are no practice exams and there's no skill proficiency tracking or exam planning. Also, when you cancel the subscription, you lose access to all content.
Professional is for anyone who wants to study for a Microsoft certification. All skill- and exam features are enabled. And when you cancel the subscription, you keep access to anything you watched.
Business is for companies. In this subscription you can set up teams and have managers track the study progress of their people.
Social media
In the coming weeks, I'm going to enthusiastically promote MDFT Pro on social media . Feel free to follow me here:
Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markfarragher/
Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/mark.mdft.social
Mastodon: https://mdft.social/@mark