Test, Test and test some more testers are needed and the universities don’t produce many

Even the Universities leadership admits that getting the knowledge about significant test capabilities is impossible with all of the other things that students need to learn.  So what to do?  Well this is an opportunity for you.  Yes you.

What does a tester do?

• QA and test professionals’ core responsibility is to verify whether the application is performing to the requirements; this translates to performing functional testing and verifying feature-level operation at the system level and in user interfaces.

What kind of tools does Microsoft offer?

• Each version of Visual Studio 2010 comes complete with unit testing capabilities that help teams run these important tests. (Except for Express)

How do you get experience as a tester:

• Become a tester for an open source project (of course Open Source using Microsoft products is best, I am after all an employee of Microsoft), most open source projects welcome this kind of assistance.  These are real world projects and something that is easily pointed to during an interview.
• Keep in mind this gives you information about how to use the open source product for your own company and how to make money off of it.

If you are a STEM Student or Professor:

• Get Visual Studio Ultimate and experiment with the Test manager component

If you are a professional or between jobs

• Use the Demo versions if you are between jobs
• If you are professional and your company won’t pop for one of the paid versions of Visual Studio, purchase Visual Studio Pro at Fry’s it’s about $150 or so

Finally:

There are videos and virtual labs online you can search for them at MSDN