Another exam passed

I've just passed another MS Exam: 70-561 - ADO.NET Application Development
I passed it with score 895 out of 1000, which is good (in my opinion), because I haven't had even one REAL project with Entity Framework (only a couple of testing ones), and there were many Entity Framework questions.

Exam preparation materials

Here is the list of materials I used for preparation for my last exam:

1) books:

• MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-503) - Microsoft Framework 3.5 - Windows Communication Foundation
• "Microsoft Windows Communication Foundation Step by Step" by John Sharp
• "Programming WCF Services, Second Edition" by Juval Lowy

2) screencasts:

• http://www.microsoft.com/uk/msdn/screencasts/presenter/11/Mike-Taulty.aspx (see screencasts about WCF, all other ones are also useful, I'll have a look on them on next exams preparation)
• http://www.dasblonde.net/2007/06/24/WCFWebcastSeries.aspx (webcasts by Michele Bustamante)

Especially important was to watch and study thoroughly these topics:

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 04 of 15): Exceptions and Faults

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 08 of 15): Instancing Modes

Transactions in Distributed Solutions with Windows Communication Foundation

Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom (Part 09 of 15): Concurrency, Throughput, and Throttling

From my point of view, all topics related to concurrency, instances are not too simple.

MS Exam 70-503 PASSED!

Another step passed:
Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Windows Communication Foundation Application Development (70-503)

I managed to pass this exam with score 916 out of 1000.

Now I'm an MCTS (MS Certified Technology Specialist) in Windows Communication Foundation.

Currently I'm preparing for exam 70-561 (ADO.NET)...

Running unmanaged code on Windows Azure

Yesterday night I had a speech on Wellington .NET User group and presented "Running unmanaged code on Windows Azure".

Later I'm going to publish some findings and interesting tricks from this project.

Here are the slides:

Native code on ms azure platform

View more presentations from lysunkin.

First step to MCPD

Here is my first step to MCPD (Microsoft Certified Professional Developer):

https://mcp.microsoft.com/authenticate/validatemcp.aspx

Transcript ID (901837)

Access Code (slava1976)

Currently I passed only Exam 70-536, but...

I plan to sit and pass these exams:

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Windows Communication Foundation Application Development (70-503)

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – Windows Forms Application Development (70-505)

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ADO.NET Application Development (70-561)

Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Application Development (70-562)

Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 (70-565)

Wish me good luck!

Old school T-shirt

Last Wednesday (on Wellington .NET User Group meeting) I received pretty nice T-shirt, you may have a look on it here, for example:
http://dev.null.org/blog/item/200812081001_softbymic

It looks pretty old-style and only "true" desktop programmers are able to recognize the logo and remember "old good times" when most programs were single-threaded and have less then 640k of memory :)

Pictures

Here are new photos of my life in NZ:

http://picasaweb.google.com/lysunkin/LifeInNewZealand#

P.S. I'm busy all the time - I'll write more articles later...

Industrial production of holy water

Recently I remembered famous phrase of Rudolf Sikorski from "Beetle in the Anthill" (Boris and Arkady Strugatsky):
"As members of COMCON-2 we are allowed to have a reputation of ignoramuses, mystics and superstitious fools. But we are not allowed one single thing - that is, to underestimate a threat. And if our house suddenly smells of sulfur, we must suppose that a horned devil appeared somewhere near and take any necessary measures, even if that means organizing an industrial production of holy water."
I remembered it in a case where someone asked me "Slava, why are you so nervous?" :)

At last - I'm in New Zealand

Well at last I got to New Zealand, the land of my dreams!
My trip was uneasy as I may say: 16 hours by train and more then 30 hours on airports and flights.
I'll tell more details later, when I take some rest.

How to decompile CHM files

Recently I bought Sony PRS-505 e-book reader. I reads a lot of formats (like PDF, RTF, TXT). Also it reads EPUB (public) and LRF (Sony internal) formats.
But I need to read my CHM books on that device.
So I see the following way of converting CHM into something readable:
1) decompile CHM into a set of HTMLs
2) create EPUB file

I found that every Windows user already has an ability to decompile CHM - it is easy as a pie, just execute

hh -decompile [target folder] [CHM file]

Now I'm searching how to create EPUB file (it must not be difficult, because EPUB file looks similar to zipped set of xml files).