I have to start by apologizing profusely for how this whole training thing has gone.  Personnally, I feel like an idiot for how many times we’ve said the training would be ready and then it wasn’t or made it available only to take it away again.  It’s been really painful.  Part of the problem has been the way the training effort has been resourced internally.  It’s mostly been a volunteer effort with people from the different product groups contributing time.  We now have a permanent owner for it and while I don’t expect all of the problems to evaporate, I’m optimistic that things will get better.  As big as Microsoft is, you might wonder how we can’t find a few people to work on our training effort full time – I know it’s shocking but even we have limits on resources. Although I feel as bad as I can about the path, I still feel very good about the resulting content.  We’ve worked very hard to make sure we produced some high quality and pretty broad training content and it is now available again (and I hope this time, for good). The 200 level content is available here:http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=527e2a17-1dea-4d0b-9484-6ae43d00e570 and is available for all who want to download.  We are also working on creating a way for people to take that training online without downloading it all themselves.  That’s not in place yet but I’ll let you know if and when that comes to pass. There’s been a change in the 300 level content availability.  As I’ve said in the past, this content is designed for classroom delivery by a trained instructor.  As such, it won’t be available for broad download.  It will be available to all Microsoft Certified Partners with a Custom Development Solutions competency (https://partner.microsoft.com/global/program/competencies/cdsolutions).  All current qualifying partners should receive an invitation to the connect site.  It will also be available on a limited basis by special request.  Feel free to email me if you feel you need it and aren’t in the partner program.  I’ll see what I can do.  If I get flooded with requests, we’ll have to figure something else out 🙂  Good luck with it and let me know how it goes.

Brian