Free online course game programming in C# from the University of Colorado
 

https://www.coursera.org/course/gameprogramming

That sounds nice, but it's a lot of content for two months span. It may be a bit tough for people with absolutely no experience in the area.

An awesome find, Japo. I guess I should dust off Visual Studio, eh? :)

BTW: IIRC even once the courses are over Coursera still provides the materials.

Regarding workload, it's supposed to be in the order of a traditional college course, not a regular online course. As for difficulty, I don't think it will be an issue for anyone really interested, the requirements specify that they'll teach programming from zero; still again it will take some hours every week. For people who already know programming and even object-oriented programming this course is too easy actually, so we can probably complete it faster, and hopefully learn something that we wouldn't learn faster by looking up XNA in the MSDN library...? Or at least take the time to play with a project with some guidance and a timeline.

This Fall I want to take at least this one and the Aerodynamics one from MIT...

Well, I was comparing the workload to actual college courses. Back in the university, I learned basic algorithm programming and C over a four months course. And that was a pure algorithm/C syntax course, no focus on other technologies. Granted, I had other courses in parallel, mostly math and basic engineering subjects.

The online course proposes going over full algorithm basis, class/objects OO knowledge, and other technologies over only two months. That's why I am bit skeptical about the experience (or lack thereof) required.

Yeaaah don't you expect them to get very far in teaching any of those. It's from a university, but it looks like only a little bit of everything. I mean, if that "Teddy Bear Destruction" minigame is a sample of what we will have completed at the end of the course...

I don't see any specific mentions of algorithmics that they plan to cover, I'd bet it will be if/for/while and little more.

If you want a course about algorithms, I did this other one last year, it was interesting.

And I don't think they plan to teach object oriented patterning further than the strictly necessary to teach C# itself...

I expect this to be a very basic introduction to programming using C# together with an introduction to XNA. As for the .NET standard library, it doesn't look like they'll cover more than string manipulation, and quite basic at that. I'd actually prefer something more advanced that required some background (actually C#/.NET is by far the language I know best).

TBH, I would not be surprised if the basic stuff was not part of the course curriculum itself but rather optional supplementary meterial.