Monday, April 02, 2007
Back in November 2005 each attendee of Microsoft's Ready to Launch events came away with (amongst other things) a voucher entitling them to take one of six .NET 2.0, SQL 2005 or BizTalk 2006 exams. Fast forward some 17 months and despite the voucher having long since expired, I finally got around to taking and passing 70-536.
Everyone's got their own opinion of certification, and I would certainly agree that exams like this are far from perfect. It seems to me that one of the biggest problems (along with brain dumps) is that of interpretation. What does it mean to have passed this exam? In this case for example, it's important to remember that you're learning virtually nothing about a candidates ability to write elegant, maintainable code, and even less about their broader skills as a developer. And it's this that frustrates people so much when that person who's been fast tracked through an entire certification program by their employer starts showing off their newly be-logoed business card and lapel pin. But I digress...
I found this exam useful. I come away with a broader awareness of the framework having spent time looking in areas I wouldn't have done otherwise. (I also have an additional 76 folders in "D:\Documents\Visual Studio 2005\Projects" to show for it.) I think it can be tempting to jump straight into developing for your target platform, whether that's Windows Forms, ASP.NET or SharePoint even, without taking the time to look at the goodness available to you in the framework. This isn't VBScript, there are thousands of types at your disposal and although you're likely to use Google before rolling your own MD5 implementation, there are more subtle features that must regularly be rewritten (probably less well) when they needn't be. And who's looked at say Code Access Security? I'm sure you have, but for every one of you who has I'll bet I can find two of them that haven't. Having said that, the one criticism you might make is that some of the content of the exam (e.g. GDI+) doesn't really sit that well with the Application Development Foundation title, and could make way for some more content around say generics and their use beyond generic collections.
Until last week it was 1998 when I last took an MCP exam. I'm not sure it will be as long until I take another.
Thursday, March 22, 2007
Without the Internet, without people doing this (and without the Global Index, obviously) I don't think I could do my job as a developer. In fact, I couldn't do my job as a developer. With this in mind, I've setup this blog so that maybe I can give something back and ease my conscience at the same time.
Since I spend a great deal of time working on or thinking about the SharePoint project I'm currently involved with, it's likely I'll post about that most frequently, at least for the time being. I also want to post on related computing, developer topics too, so we'll see how things work out.
Targeting this post at my current readership, here are a couple of thoughts I might need to remind myself of in the future.
- I chose to start this. If at anytime it becomes too much work, too stressful or too boring I'm allowed to stop.
- The signal-to-noise ratio of the Internet is low enough already. I should avoid making things worse for everybody's sake.
I finally went and did it.