Attend A Seminar In Your PJs: Free Adobe Dev. Week "Webinars"

Adobe shows some love to the folks who actually make their technologies relevant: developers.

Admit it: without good "3rd party" developers to make it dance and sing, no platform or technology would ever succeed. That's why Adobe is holding its annual "Developer Week" from May 10-14, 2010, to encourage existing developers to delve deeper into their offerings and to entice novices into the fold. The key part of this event are 20 free web training seminars Adobe is running to cover a gamut of Adobe-related development technologies, from Flash and Flex to Coldfusion.

Yes, they are "Web Seminars" and all you need is a browser, the Flash plug-in and an internet connection to participate. Of course Adobe calls them "Webinars". How very "2.0" of them. <cough>

Bonus: anyone who registers and attends a session is eligible to win a copy of Flash Builder 4 Professional or Creative Suite 5 Web Premium, with one copy of FB4 Pro being awarded per session and 3 copies of CS5 Web Premium being drawn among all attendees.

You can register online right here. Enjoy!

If you missed 360|Flex but would like to get some Flex/Flash developer training for free, you definitely should check this out. All sorts of topics will be covered, from introductory level to  überflashalicious. Besides, admit it: you've never been trained by industry-leading experts while eating munchies in your pajamas before, have you? Now's your chance, so get on it already.

Seminars I think people (by "people" I of course mean "myself") will find particularly interesting are:

• Creating Sexy Applications with the Adobe® Flash® Platform: Designer-Developer Workflow

• Advanced Features In Adobe® Flex®

• Adobe® Flex® and BlazeDS Integration with SpringSource

If you are a student or are currently unemployed/employed outside of the software development field, this is by far your best chance to start building some salable skills for free. Go fetch  a free, legal license to Flash Builder from Adobe and get yourself trained up. I'll see you in the trenches. Kudos to Adobe for making their development tools and experienced trainers available to the next generation of Flash/Flex developers.

Finally, looking at the seminars on tap, my only real disappointment is that I don't see any Livecycle-related training on tap. As my colleague and friend Kevin would say: "What up?" If Adobe doesn't promote their own flagship enterprise technology to developers, then who the heck will? They should get one of their gurus ( Christophe or Greg, for instance) and spread the word.

As always, I invite your comments. Ciao!