Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

I’ll be attending Ruby Fools in Copenhagen this Tuesday and Wednesday. Add a comment if you’re going and want to meet up.

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It’s been pretty quiet around here, but now I have something to write about. In my last post I wrote about passing the MCTS Distributed exam, and that this meant I was on track for the MCPD Enterprise Application Development exam. Well, this Friday I took the exam and passed with 860 points. So I’m now officially an MCPD. This page with statistics of the number of MCP’s worldwide states that there are 3424 persons that holds this certification. The numbers are from January 2008. Somehow that doesn’t seem like a lot of people.

Anyway, I followed the recipe that seems to work for me. Read the Self-Paced Training Kit book and do practice exams. I read MCPD Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-549): Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework cover to cover, and did practice tests like MeasureUp.
For some strange reason I didn’t get a score report after my exam, so I can’t comment on how well I performed on different areas of the exam. However, I can comment a bit on the types of questions I was asked. Most of the questions involves a fair bit of text, stating requirements for a specific solution. The solution is then proposed and you need to answer if the solution fulfills the requirements and if not why not. It’s still multiple choice, but a tad more difficult than your standard techie questions. Mainly because they’re looking for a specific solution. And the answer is not always how you would go about doing it.
In summary after taking this exam I don’t find it particularly difficult if you’ve studied some kind of computer science or software engineering. A lot of this stuff is pretty basic, and easily approachable.

With the MCPD out of the way I don’t know what my next certification goals should be. Maybe I should focus on SQL Server or some Biztalk stuff. Maybe focus a bit on the Infrastructure and Server exams, which I’ll have to go for later this year anyway. I’ll keep the blog posted.

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Shortly after my last post (on January 24th, yikes) I left with the 3 other NG’s for Prague. We were going to particpiate in MACH Intro School for EMEA. I wrote about about the connection between NG and MACH in a previous post. The Intro School is the first chance to meet your peers in your closest region. Denmark belogs to Western Europe (WE) which is part of Europe, Middle East and Africa (EMEA). This meant that there were a lot of different cultures and languages convening in Prague. The purpose of Intro School is to give you guidance and skills to tackle your work life at Microsoft, and networking. Actually the latter should probably be written as NETWORKING! And so we did I had a blast talking and just goofing around with the other MACH hires. Plus 2 weeks in Prague doesn’t kill you either. They’ve got good beer and good food. Awesome!

After Prague I started prepping for the exam Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Distributed Application Development (70-529), and deals with Web Services, Remoting, WSE 3.0, Enterprise Services, and MSMQ. My strategy was the same as for the other exams, read the book, do practice tests, iterate on my weak points. And sure thing it worked! I passed on the 15th with a score of 965. Pretty cool.
This means that I’m now a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) in Web Apps, Windows Apps and Distributed Apps. But more importantly I’m on track to become a Microsoft Certificed Proffesional Developer in Enterprise Applications Developer. I need one more exam – the PRO: Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications by Using the Microsoft .NET Framework (70-549) - to achieve the title. So that’s definitely my goal to accomplish that within the coming couple of months.

Followers of my Delicious feed will notice that I do a bit of work on Forefront, which is Microsoft’s Anti Malware software suite.

Last week I attended internal training on Microsoft Solutions Framework (MSF), which is Microsoft’s model for delivering solutions be it software development or infrastructure setup. It was good because it conveyed the language used internally when talking about which phase a project is in, or what milestone has been reached. I’ll definitely benefit from it.

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