Yesterday I passed Microsoft exam 70-562, which covers .NET Framework 3.5 and ASP.NET Application Development.  It was a bit of a relief to finally get this done, since completing the base exam 70-562 almost two years ago.  Now I actually have something to show for all this work: I'm officially a MCTS.

I have mixed feelings on these exams.  On the one hand, I feel that its important for developers to stay on top of their field.  Often we go through cycles where we are only using a small subset of our knowledge on the problems at hand, so its important to keep up with advances in other areas should the need arise to make use of them.  There is also the broader issue of the lack of standards for software designers and developers.  Our field is riddled with bad programmers who are only in this for the money and are ultimately making life difficult for the rest of us who love technology and would do this stuff even if it paid a fraction of what it does.  One potential way of eliminating these people from our lives is by ensuring that there is some common measure of commitment.  In theory, if all the good companies who are doing all the cool stuff require you to have up-to-date certs, then they will hire less of baddies, who will go work for crappy companies that don't require it.  Obviously there are holes in this logic, and I don't think certs are the ultimate answer to the problem, but its a start.

On the other hand, its easy to make the argument that the tests are ineffective in truly gauging our abilities.  Indeed, you can guess or infer the answers to some of the questions with knowledge of how Microsoft structures its APIs (see one of my hints below).  I would also say that Microsoft's training related website is overcomplicated, and the materials (books, free online tutorials) available for training are not very sufficient or effective (I can't comment on pay-per-use or in-person training sessions however, as I have never attended any).

Philosophical analysis aside, for those of you looking to do an exam, here are some hints

• 70-562 is actually an augmentation of 70-528, covering whats in ASP.NET 2.0. I would say the mix on the exam was about 70/30 old stuff to new.  The MCTS 70-528 training kit is still very relivant, and I actually found it more helpful and less full of fluff then Esposito's newer ASP.NET 3.5 book.
• While an understanding of the language (C#/VB) you intend to write you exam in is required, knowing the latest language features (annonymous types, linq, extension methods, etc.) doesn't seem to be needed for this exam.  Way more emphasis is put on knowing how the ASP.NET Framework and IIS work rather then unique language constructs.
• Some of the new stuff you should know includes new controls like the ListView , MultiView , ScriptManager , and UpdatePanel controls. In particular, really know how UpdatePanel works, how nested UpdatePanels work, how to make sure of the ChildrenAsTriggers property and so on.
• Know how ASP.NET AJAX Javascript libraries work.
• Know the difference between Bind and Eval.
• Know page lifecycle -- which events (Init, Load, etc.) are handled by a page, in which order they are handled, and what is possible when each event fires. This is a lot harder to guess if you don't know, but if you do know its an easy hit.
• You are bound to get a question which boils down to, "Here's some code. What should you insert at line X" and the choices vary by a single property, none of which you're familier with.  Take a deep breath, read the question two more times, and then look at each property and think about which one looks the most right to you and go with that. Look at how the properties are named -- property names are generally self descriptive, so you should be able to infer what each property does by its name.  Insert each at line X in your mind and think about which one seems the most right.
• I bought the MeasureUp materials; I am terrible at taking tests, so being able to practice taking a test was really helpful to me.  If you have a photographic memory, you might not need this as much.
• Once you purchase your exam from Prometric, set a reasonable date and stick to it.  I kept pushing the date, always finding excuses not to write this week, which was really about not commiting to a schedule for getting through the material.
• During the exam, use all your time, and don't rush.  Take a break half way through and get some water.  These are of course obvious general test taking practices which people tend to ignore or forget.
• Microsoft has a second shot promotion so if you do screw up, you get um... a second shot!

Wow its been more then a month since I posted anything.

Well, I *have* been busy.

In January, I helped paxUnited get started with a new website driven by CMS mojoportal.  My team's project got blogged about by the creator of mojoportal.  Jay Smith also has some details of the project and pictures.

Recently, I've been working on a learning WCF, and as part of that creating my own multiplayer game service.  The game I chose is the italian card game Briscola, an old favourite of mine.

I started by first writing a class library assembly that would contain the objects necessary to play the game according to the rules.  Then I designed a WCF service which would augment the core library and expose it as an Interface.  I chose the wsDualHttpBinding binding, which basically enabled bi-directional communication between client and server byway of an additional Interface which defines callback methods which the client implements.  Its just really really cool stuff, as I remember the headache trying to do something like this back in the day with DCOM or (*gulp*) sockets.  Anyway, I build a really simple command-line application with consumes the service.  With a few clicks I had class BriscolaClient : System.ServiceModel.DuplexClientBase<IBriscola> defined, and just had to write a class to implement IBriscolaCallback.  After working out a few bugs,  I had two client windows connecting to the IIS hosted service and working great!

Now, I have uploaded the service to my Web Hosting Provider here, but unfortuntaly most people wouldn't be able to connect to the service because firewalls would prevent them (in fact my own did until I told it not too).  In any case, this is just a first step, and I consider the wsDualHttpBinding to more applicable to an intranet scenario.  Nonetheless, I indend to proceed with this project.  My next step will to be build a basic SOAP web service around the game, and I'm also currently reading an interesting book called RESTful .NET which may lead me in the direction of exposing the game byway of REST and JSON.  In any case, the ultimate goal is to leaverage the service in some platforms which are unfamilier to me, such as iPhone and facebook applications, so that I can come full circle and learn some new languages (Objective-C/PHP) along the way.

Also, the shortlist of features includes

* Again, expanding the service endpoints for support for SOAP WS-* and REST

* Integration of some sort of membership (username/password) to set up a game player profile

* Persistance of game data in a database

* Looking to get this up in the cloud (via Azure or some other host), for instant scalability.

I'm attending the MSDN Developer Conference at the Westin Galleria on Monday, Jan. 26, which is sort of a mini-pdc covering topics in the areas of Azure Services Platform for Cloud Computing, Client and Presentation, and Tools, Languages and Framework.

My top sessions choices are:

• ASP.NET and JQuery
• Developing and Deploying Your First Azure Services
• A Lap Around the Live Framework and Mesh Services
• ASP.NET 4.0 Roadmap

Hopefully one of my colleagues can attend Building Business-Focused Applications Using Silverlight 2 and share the experience because I have an interest in learning silverlight after my brief, poor experience developing an mp3 music player in flash for Jessica Clemmon's site.

I decided to sign up to volunteer for a good cause as a developer for the The We Are Microsoft - Charity Challenge Weekend.

"This 3-day event matches developers with charities to develop applications for those charities. At the end of the 3 days, all of the participants will vote and the winners will be proclaimed champion coders., to help local charities with some website work."

I spent some time on this blog this weekend, upgrading to Blogengine 1.4.5, changing the theme a bit, and adding a Twitter extension, and added web analytics support through GetClicky.

Next, I'd like to add a few more custom controls that show what what's in my netflix queue, what I'm currently reading/listening to, etc.

I've spent quite a lot of time thinking of ideas for the Microsoft Dare To Dream Different Challenge, promoting use of the .NET Micro Framework for embedded devices.

The cool thing about this contest is that to enter you just need to have a cool idea which could be implemented using microprocessor-driven embedded software.

I spread the word about this thing quite extensively, but unfortunately I didn't find many people looking to join together as a team.  It was frusterating for me was trying to settle on an idea -- I kept thinking, "well that's good but there's got to be an even more killer idea".  Thus, procrastination set it, and I didn't even decide on my submission until hours before the due date!  In the end, I went with my concept for a real-time universal speech translator.  The thought had occured to me after playing with text-to-speach web apps, and babelfish, that you could really mash these things up in a web service and end up with a system that could take digital speech and perform audio-text-text-audio, translating one spoken language to another.  A few searches revealed that this had already been investigated, and Cisco is even looking at turning it into a product.  But, sometimes you just have to pick an idea and go with it, so I did.  I submitted it to the hobbiest category, as I'm just in it for fun on this one.  Jenni helped by making this cool diagram of the universal translator.

Other ideas included an automated bar, with tubes connected to a relay-driven pump system that can automatically mix drinks based on a pre-programmed recipe.  You could even enhance it by the "bartender" to input the contents of each bottle, and connecting to a database of drinks recipes to get a customized list.  Some people have build this already.

I also considered doing an enhanced version of trivial pursuit, where questions could be customized based on players skillsets, but got stuck on the details.

I'm curious now to see what the other entrants came up with.  They announce the round 2 finalists on Jan. 15.

There are some excellent people in Dallas who are organizing this event, where art is auctioned off for charity.

Several of my friends are amongst the 150 or so artists who will be working in shifts to complete their contributions.

Its an awesome way to support a good cause.

Last night we went to see a fashion art installation called BASE at Corinth Park.

They had some wire sculptures by Scott Horn, and recreation of the "high five" (where hwy 635 and 75 meet, in Dallas).

I feel a little silly that I was inside my house vacuuming yesterday, while this was going on down the street.