One of the things employers look for when applying for a job are certifications. If you have a certification, you have an advantage over others who don’t.
freeCodeCamp just announced on Aug 29, in conjunction with Microsoft, a free online certification program for C#, the Foundational C# Certification. It covers 38 lessons over 35 hours of content, using Microsoft’s in-browser .NET code editor to follow along.
This is a completely free certification, which is unusual because most professional certifications require paying an exam fee and having a credit card.
How It Works
This certification is available until Oct 31, 2023. You need to sign up with freeCodeCamp and start the challenge. This links to Microsoft’s challenge pages for this. But I believe you should also sign up for the challenge here, to link your Microsoft account. You can also see a handy countdown to tell you how many days you have left to claim your certification.
How it works is, you click on each task in freeCodeCamp and work through the challenge on Microsoft’s site. There are 38 lessons and guided projects, and a Trophy challenge at the end of each section. You must complete all the Trophy challenges before it allows you to write the Certification Exam.
If you pass the Certification Exam, you receive the certification.
This challenge covers basic C# knowledge, so it should be pretty easy if you already have exposure to C# through Unity. You may learn some things that you didn’t know, so I recommend doing this and getting certified. Hurry, though, because it’s only available for the next 2 months.
Course Curriculum
The course is comprised of the following sections and here is what each section covers:
- Write Your First Code using C#
- Variables, String Formatting, basic operations on numbers
- Create and Run Simple C# Console Applications
- Calling methods, if-else-else if statements, arrays, foreach, whitespace and comments
- Add Logic to C# Console Applications
- boolean expressions, scope, switch-case, for statement, while loops
- Work With Variable Data in C# Console Applications
- casting, array operations, formatting data, built-in string methods
- Create Methods in C# Console Applications
- creating methods, parameters, return values
- Debug C# Console Applications
- debugging tools, exception handling, creating and throwing exceptions
Links
freeCodeCamp’s press release: https://www.freecodecamp.org/news/free-microsoft-c-sharp-certification/
freeCodeCamp: https://www.freecodecamp.org/learn/foundational-c-sharp-with-microsoft
Microsoft: https://learn.microsoft.com/en-us/training/challenges?id=8cf09b9b-743d-4f5f-9cd0-1aa1483d3d7a