Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

With only a few hours left before me and my family sit down at the table, I wanted to wish everyone a Merry Christmas if you celebrate that or Happy Holidays should you celebrate something else.

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I passed the exam 70-536 yesterday. After the exam you get a print-out stating were you did well and not so well. From the printout I see that I was best in the topic "Embedding Configuration, Diagnostics, Management, and Installation features into a .NET Framework application" and  "Implementing globalization, drawing, and text manipulation functionality in a .NET Framework application". My worst topic was "Developing applications that use system types and applications".
However, all in all I’m pretty satisfied with my performance on the exam. It has been quite beneficial to actually go take an exam and get a feel for the format and types of questions asked. Furthermore, I think I have a better idea on how to prep for the coming exams.

Expect to hear more about this as I prepare, take, and hopefully pass more exams and achieve certification status.

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As part of the Next Generation program I’m getting certified on Microsoft technology. This includes a number of MCTS (Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist) exams with development and IT Pro content. For the development track you need to pass exam 70-536: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0—Application Development Foundation to get an MCTS in WinForms Development or ASP.NET. Since I have go through the material anyway, I thought I might as well get an early start. So I borrowed a self-paced training kit from Henrik WH, and started reading the book for 536 last week.
At Microsoft we have an internal test center, which means that to take an exam you just go downstairs. So easy, and so convenient. The local administrator is in my department, so signing up for an exam is pretty easy. I had arranged to take the exam this morning at 9, which meant I more or less had a deadline for finishing the book. My plan was to read the book, and take the exam. I didn’t really expect to pass, but wanted to give it a try. Mainly to see what it was all about.  I finished the last couple of chapters last night on the way home in a plane from Aalborg, so i guess my plan stood up.

I took the test this morning. It consists of 45 questions of varying format, most of which are multiple choice. I spend about 45 minutes on the exam. I worked through the questions in one pass, marking the ones I had doubts about. After answering all the questions I worked through the marked questions once again, and ended the test. I was pretty surpriced when I got the score back: 876 out of 1000 possible, and you need 700 to pass. Very nice indeed

My strategy for this exam and the following is going to be something like written at Henrik’s blog. Read the book, and do some of the lesson reviews and practice tests on the accompanying CD in the training kit. When erroring in the practice tests, read up on the material and try again. When sufficiently confident that I can pass the test I’ll take a live one. If I pass it’s great, otherwise I’ll get a feel for what the exam consists of and use this for further cramming.

In summary I must say that the format of these exams is pretty much what I expected. There is a lot of memorizing involved, and a lot of "you just need to know it to pass". On the other hand I think you that you can deduce some of the questions by logic and experience.
Anyway, with the foundation exam out of the way I can start on the Winforms and ASP.NET exam so I can achieve MCTS status on both technologies.

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Monday morning I arrived at Microsoft in Hellerup ready for my first week. I received a mighty Lenovo laptop, a temporary mobile phone, plus some other stuff. I didn’t spend much time at the desk since I had New Employee Orientation for the rest of the day. This was mainly comprised of different introductions to all kinds of necessary stuff. HR, Finance, IT, etc. This included a bunch of links and internal tools which you need in order to do your job. This is a fact I’ve noticed already. There’s a tool for everything at Microsoft!
Tuesday included more practical stuff, including ordering business cards. The rest of this day and most of the rest of week ones days were spend doing online training. There’s all kinds of online training you have to take in your first weeks at Microsoft. I’ve been told this will continue onwards. So I’ve been doing business training, procurement, licensing, all kinds of stuff.
During the week I’ve also gained a deeper understanding of what I’ll be going through and attending throughout 2008. Some dates for courses, etc. are starting to settle and it looks mighty cool.
In keeping with the spirit of Microsoft Corp there’s free soda. And other perks includes a newly inaugurated shuttle bus between Hellerup train station and the office in the morning and afternoon. This saves you from a 10 minute walk However, it is rather nice when the weather is bad.

Friday was a cool day. This day I received my SmartCard aka the Blue Badge. The SmartCard is used to access the Corporate network when at home or on the road. It includes a picture of the employee, the name, and employee number. Around the picture there’s a colored border. For Full Time Employee’s (FTE’s) this border is blue. Hence being a blue badge means you’re an FTE. Other types of employees have different border colors. So receiving this card meant that I am now a true Microsoft FTE. I like it.

So what am I doing at Microsoft? I’m participating in the Next Generation (NG) Consultant program, which is a superset of the Microsoft Academy for College Hires (MACH) program. NG is a cooperation between the Microsoft subs in Denmark and Holland. MACH is a kind of trainee position within different departments including Sales, Marketing and Services. I’m participating in the latter, which is the consulting division. MACH includes all kinds of training and support to help you get up to speed with your job at Microsoft. There’s more information on MACH at the EMEA site.

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I just read/saw this post on Microsoft’s JobsBlog about the Microsoft Canada Development Center located in Vancouver.
It includes the following video:
Video: Microsoft Canada Development Center

It’s kind of cool to watch this video. About a month ago I was approaced by Microsoft’s recruiting office in Seattle about job opportunities in Canada. They did a visa evaluation of me, and found that I could get a work permit in Canada. However, I would still be subject to the 2 year residency rule, meaning that I would still have to stay in Denmark for the 2 year period before being able to enter the US on a work visa. So ultimately it would just push forward the inevitable.
Anyway, fun to watch how it’s like over there. Especially since the recruiter mentioned in the video – Mindy – was my recruiter when I was in Redmond for my round of interviews.

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I’m now officially a blue badge. Me like.

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Gavin Terrill writes about The Blissful Interview Candidate and how he interviews Java Developers. His explanation of this is fine and on par with most of the blogosphere on interviewing. However, his introduction to the subject is really interesting:

The Caffeinated Coder posted an interesting item today about a psychology study that shows that less competent people are generally over confident about their abilities by around 50%. Giggles about management aside, I’ve seen this bear out in my experiences. The study showed that the only way to make incompetent people understand that they didn’t know what they were talking about was to educate them about the domain. Only then, did they truly understand how foolish they sounded.

The Caffeinated Coder’s blog post is titled Is That Juice on Your Face? and deals with a study published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology. It reminds me of the old saying that the smarter you are, the more you realize how little you know (pretty darn paraphrased by me). Equally so Gavin Terril’s experience with software developers.
Jeff Atwood aka Coding Horror has had a couple of posts lately which aligns with the above. Two Types of Programmers divides programmers into the 20% that read about software development and are interested in it, and the 80% that just gets stuff done. The other Mort, Elvis, Einstein and You deals with Microsoft’s perception of Developer Persona’s as I touched upon in a previous post. Atwood points out that the true and important task is to reach out to the 80% and increase their chance of success. In this way maybe we can mitigate some of the horrifying stories of software development gone to hell.

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Somasagar announced that Parallel Extensions to the .NET FX CTP has been released. Also the Parallel Computing center on MSDN has been relased. Very cool! I really want to take a look at it, especially the data and task paralleism API’s. I listened to a podcast on Hanselminutes some time ago about the Parallel Programming with .NET with guest Stephen Toub who’s on the Parallel FX team. The podcast was very good.

Also Scott Guthrie announced a preview release of ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions coming out next week. This includes a preview of the new ASP.NET MVC framework that’s been pretty hot since the ALT.NET conference.

And I’m starting my new job as a consultant at Microsoft on Monday. Exciting times indeed

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