After encouragement from Zain Naboulsi, Saturday I attended my first meeting of the Second Life .NET User Group.  This was actually the first time I even ventured into the Second Life world and was surprised at how similar the meeting was to a user group meeting in real life.  Just like in real life, it was slightly uncomfortable for me to walk up to a stranger and strike up a conversation.  But just like in real life, once I did start conversations, everyone I spoke to was friendly and interesting.

There is a virtual auditorium with a podium and stage and seats for attendees.  The speaker at the meeting was using a microphone so I could actually hear him through my computer speakers.  Most of the others interacted through text chatting which was a bit difficult to follow, but helpful too.  The speaker was reading the chats, too, so he could respond to any comments or questions.  This particular meeting there was no formal presentation, but I'm told Powerpoint presentations can be shown on screens in Second Life.

Overall, it was a much more natural-feeling experience than what I thought it would be.  I'll try to attend the next couple of meetings to continue to get a feel for it.

After stepping away from studying for a couple of months, I finally decided I wanted to pass my first certfication exam in 2007.  So, I studied more intensely for a week leading up to the exam and finally took and passed it on December 20.

To me the exam was actually a bit easier than the practice tests that I was using from the Training Kit book, but I've read the opinions of others who say just the opposite.  There were some questions I was able to figure out just based on the context of the questions and general programming knowledge.  There were others that I never would have known had I not specifically studied for this exam.  For example, my day to day job duties typically don't take me anywhere near topics like encryption, COM, or anything beyond basic threading, but those were areas that were covered in the Training Kit book.

I am now trying to decide which test I want to try and tackle next.  I've got an upcoming web project, so I am leaning in that direction.  That would be Exam 70-528 - Web Based Client Development. 

After taking the first exam, I definitely have a better idea of how to study for this one.  Rather than stretching out the studying over months, I will most likely study intensely for a week or two and maybe take a day off work before exam day.

I just got back from DevLink in Nashville and the first thing that comes to mind is "Wow!".  The quality of speakers, the facilities at Lipscomb University, and the organization of the event were amazing.  And to think, it only cost $50 to attend.  Kudos to the organizers.

There were tracks on general .NET, ASP.NET, databases, project management, and architecture.  At each time slot, there were multiple talks that I would have liked to attend.  After arriving at the conference and looking over the agenda, I decided that many of the database sessions looked interesting as I do a lot of database work and have never had much training in that area.

Highlights for me included a talk by Paul Nielsen on smart database design and the keynote by Ron Jacobs on test driven development and the model-view-presenter (MVP) design pattern.  I still need to look a bit more at Ron's example, but I sure feel a lot more comfortable with MVP after his talk.

The best part about the conference was the friendliness of everyone I came across.  The organizers (who were easily identifiable by the very cool DevLink jerseys) were always friendly and willing to answer questions and the speakers that I had a chance to talk to personally were all easily approachable.  And there's nothing like being surrounded by a couple hundred programmers to make for a fun weekend. 

Great conference, and I'll do my best to attend next year.

Looks like I'm going to get to go to the devLink Technical Conference in Nashville, TN on October 12-13.  I don't remember where I first heard about it, but the speaker list includes some pretty big names for a whopping $50 registration fee.

There are a wide variety of sessions on topics such as .NET, architecture, database design, and even some project management sessions.  I'm really looking forward to it!

Microsoft has begun updating a page listing the number of Microsoft Certified Professionals worldwide:

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/certified.mspx

This gives me more motivation to get through the tests as the numbers are much lower than I thought they would be.  Looks like getting to my goal of MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer would put me in a fairly elite group (1,813 as of 7/19/2007).

I've finished the first chapter in the Training Kit book and it has taken a little longer than I thought.  There are some basic programming principals such as boxing/unboxing, type conversions, etc. that I have never really taken the time to think about before.  It's all making sense so far, and I'm feeling pretty comfortable with the material. 

As far as the books, it appears the Training Kit book is going to be much simpler and less in-depth than the VB 2005 book which seems to be inline with some of the reviews I've read of both books.  I do like the way the Training Kit book is broken up into lessons within each chapter with questions at the end.  That provides a good way for me to start and end a lesson in one sitting. 

So far I've only been able to get about 30 minutes to an hour at a time to spend studying.  I'm getting pretty close to my goal of 2 hours of personal time and 2 hours of work time per week.  The last couple of weeks I've come into work early on Friday morning to get some good uninterrupted study time, and I'm going to try to keep that up each week.

Consider the following code sample:

Dim p As Person = New Person("Michael", "Paladino", 28)
Dim p2 As Person = p

p2.firstName = "Leslie"
p2.age = 27

Console.WriteLine(p)
Console.WriteLine(p2) 

In this code sample if Person is a Structure, creating p2 creates a new location in memory to store the data.  Setting p2 equal to p actually copies the data from p to the new location in memory at p2.  Therefore, changing the properties of p2 has no effect on p.  Thus the output will be as follows:

Michael Paladino, Age:28
Leslie Paladino, Age:27

If Person is a Class, setting p2 equal to p causes p2 to point to the same location in memory as p.  Therefore changing the properties on p2 also changes the properties of p, resulting in the following output:

Leslie Paladino, Age:27
Leslie Paladino, Age:27

Reference:
MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0–Application Development Foundation
Lesson 1:  Using Value Types

Since one of the main purposes of this blog is to serve as a record of my studies towards Microsoft certification, I thought I would talk a bit about the certification process as I understand it.  My goal is to become a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer: Enterprise Application Developer.  In order to acheive that, I will need to pass 5 exams earning certifications as a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist in the following areas along the way: .NET Framework 2.0 Windows Applications, Web Applications, and Distributed Applications.  The image below shows which exams I will be taking and which certifications I will receive after passing each:

My first exam will be Exam 70–536: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Application Development Foundation.  I have purchased the following Microsoft recommended books:

• MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0–Application Development Foundation
• Programming Microsoft Visual Basic 2005: The Language

I will be reading these books and going through the included sample exam questions.  After finishing those, I will evaluate whether or not I need to do further training before taking the exam.  I've done a lot of .NET programming over the last three years, but have not covered nearly the breadth of information included in these exams.  I've committed to spending 4 hours a week studying.  That number may have to be adjusted to get through the material a bit quicker.  This should be fun!