New course: Developing Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide

This probably won't surprise any of my regular readers: "SAS custom tasks" is one of my favorite topics to talk about.

Since 2007, I've written blogs about how you can use custom tasks to extend SAS Enterprise Guide and the SAS Add-In for Microsoft Office. I've shared lots of examples, many that you can use simply "as-is" without any special technical knowledge. I presented a SAS Talks webinar on the topic. And I even wrote the book: Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide Using Microsoft .NET.

Now I'm ready to take this show on the road, and teach this topic in a classroom setting. I've built a new SAS course: Developing Custom Tasks for SAS Enterprise Guide.

I taught the course for the first time this past April. All new SAS courses go through a "test teach", in which internal SAS folks participate as students. The purpose of a test teach is to ensure that the course materials, software setup, and instructor are all up to the high standards for SAS Training offerings. In my test teach, I had students from Technical Support, R&D, Product Management, Education, and Professional Services. That's a pretty good mix, and I got some good feedback. At the end, we agreed that the course is ready for prime time.

Here are some high-level features that you can expect from the course:

It's a two-day course -- and we fill the time!

We cover the SAS APIs and toolkits that make custom tasks possible. We also cover best practices for design and build, which make it much easier to have successful custom task projects.

Students will get plenty of hands-on experience, some as instructor-led tutorials and some as independent lab exercises.

You will build a complete custom task, in class!

You don't need to be a SAS expert or Microsoft .NET expert coming in, but I recommend that you have base SAS programming experience and also experience with some object-oriented development tool, such as Microsoft Visual Studio (C# or Visual Basic) or Eclipse (with Java).

You should come having at least working knowledge of SAS Enterprise Guide.

If all of this sounds interesting to you, I hope to see you in a SAS training center in the near future! Check the SAS Training & Books web site for schedules and locations. (Note, this link is from the USA course catalog. Other countries might add the course later, based on interest. Hint, hint.)