Thursday 29 October 2009

The Pros and Cons of IT Certification

I have been planning to write this post for a long while. It was on my to-do list for ages and just kept getting putting off. Well I am finally getting around to it.

This blog deals mostly with Microsoft certifications primarily because it is the certification group I am familiar with and also because I have take quite a few exams with Microsoft. I like to think I have a good understanding of the IT certification process at this time

733137_my_two_cents I have met quite a few people who criticise certification and in some cases I agree with them and in others I believe they are entitled to their opinion. I have heard arguments from people that are on both sides of the certified fence. I have heard the same things about university degrees as well again from both sides. Some will argue that a degree with stifle creative thinking, others will say it shows a willingness to learn. Both have merits in their points of view.

For what its worth, I believe that certifications prove one thing. That you knew enough at one time or another to pass them. That’s about it. It is the same as a university degree in that regard. You passed your exams that your lecturers set for you and that garnered you enough credits to obtain your degree.

It does not mean that you everything there is to know about the subject you are certified in but at least it does prove that you knew something at one time to pass it.

So a couple of pros for IT certification

  • Encourages you to learn some material about the subject matter that you may not have know and/or possibly should have known.
  • Gives people a quick and relative marker to your knowledge level in the subject.
  • Shows commitment to getting the certification
  • Shows you can at least learn
  • Adds to the resources of the holder, may not know the answer but will know where to look.
  • Vendor benefits from having certified people on staff.

And the flip side of the coin, the cons

  • You knew enough at one point to pass the exam which doesn’t mean you know it now
  • Certifications are not as strong unless backed up by experience (the paper MCSE scenario)
  • Brain dumps, did you get your certification on your merit or with a little help of insider knowledge
  • Certification is sometimes used as the end all and be all of recruitment.
  • The testing process is sometimes not inline with real world situations
  • Cost and does not always guarantee a job

So its like anything really, there are good and bad sides to it. If you think differently or have more to add please leave a comment

Upcoming SharePoint 2010 Certifications

Well it looks like Microsoft have listened and decided to make 2 professional level certifications available for SharePoint. In SharePoint 2010 you will now be able to get certified as an MCITP and MCPD for SharePoint as well as the usual MCTS certifications.

SharePoint2010_2_05B51426

For the IT Pros

New on for IT Pros are 2 certifications. MCTS SharePoint 2010 Configuring and MCITP SharePoint 2010.

  • 70-667 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Configuring
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Will cover configuration of SharePoint 2010 including deployment, upgrade, management, and operation on a server farm.

  • 70-668 PRO: SharePoint 2010, Administrator
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Will cover advanced SharePoint 2010 topics including capacity planning, topology designing, and performance tuning.

For developers

Also for developers there will be 2 new certifications. MCTS SharePoint 2010 Application Development and MCPD SharePoint 2010.

  • 70-573 TS: Microsoft SharePoint 2010, Application Development
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Five-day instructor-led course designed for developers with six months or more of .NET development experience. Course covers what you need to know to be an effective member of a SharePoint development team using Visual Studio 2010.

  • 70-576 PRO: Designing and Developing Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Applications
    Microsoft Official Curriculum: Five-day instructor-led training course designed for development team leads who have already passed the Developing on SharePoint 2010 technical specialist exam. The course covers choosing technologies for and scoping a SharePoint project, best practices for SharePoint development, configuring a SharePoint development environment, advanced use of SharePoint developer features, and debugging of code in a SharePoint project.

These new certifications also feed into the Microsoft Certified Master certification for SharePoint 2010. The MCM for SharePoint 2007 required 4 MCTS certifications whereas the 2010 version will require the MCPD and MCITP for SharePoint 2010. The experience requirements have not yet been release nor has the how the upgrade will work from MCM 2007 to MCM 2010.

There will be no upgrade path from the MCTS 2007 to MCITP/MCPD 2010 due to the fact that there are Pro level certifications for 2007 making the upgrade process redundant.

More information can be got on the MS Partners site here. Release dates according to the documentation I have here estimate June 2010

Wednesday 28 October 2009

Speeding up the start up of Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2

I am really like the improvements in Visual Studio 2010 Beta 2. Its faster than Beta 1 but the start up time was crap. Just plain tortoise slow!

Vs2010

A quick glance around the web brought me to a post by Jaime Rodriguez about to speed up VS 2010 Beta 2

You need to add a new registry key to do this: WARNING DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU DON’T UNDERSTAND WHAT EDITING THE REGISTRY WILL DO IF YOU SCREW IT UP!!!!!!! <—Bold type and lots of exclamation marks mean you need to read this!

1. Close any open VS instances
2. Open RegEdit (as an administrator as needed)
3. Select the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\10.0 key
4. Right click and add key, type ClrHost
5. In the newly created key, right click and add a DWORD32 with the name StartupFlags
6. Set its value to 5
7. Close RegEdit
8. Start up Visual Studio and use as normal

This decreases the start up time considerably. On my hardware it took 25 seconds to open now its down to 2 seconds.

Additional information can be found here

MCTS Windows Forms 3.5 – 70-505 – Objectives List Part 5

This is the fifth post (first, second, third, fourth) in another collection of posts that have links to the different objectives covered in the 70-505 exam.

Implementing Asynchronous Programming Techniques to Improve the User Experience (15%)

You can also find some information on preparing for your exams here, in the actual exam for 70-505. Also errata for the MS Press training kit

Tuesday 27 October 2009

MCTS Windows Forms 3.5 – 70-505 – Objectives List Part 4

This is the fourth post (first, second, third) in another collection of posts that have links to the different objectives covered in the 70-505 exam.

Enhancing Usability (13%)

You can also find some information on preparing for your exams here, in the actual exam for 70-505. Also errata for the MS Press training kit

Sunday 25 October 2009

MCTS Windows Forms 3.5 – 70-505 – Objectives List Part 3

This is the third post (first, second) in another collection of posts that have links to the different objectives covered in the 70-505 exam.

Implementing Printing and Reporting Functionality in a Windows Forms Application (11%)

You can also find some information on preparing for your exams here, in the actual exam for 70-505. Also errata for the MS Press training kit

MCTS Windows Forms 3.5 – 70-505 – Objectives List Part 2

This is the second post (first) in another collection of posts that have links to the different objectives covered in the 70-505 exam.

Integrating Data in a Windows Forms Application (22%)

You can also find some information on preparing for your exams here, in the actual exam for 70-505. Also errata for the MS Press training kit

Friday 23 October 2009

MCTS Windows Forms 3.5 – 70-505 – Objectives List Part 1

This is the first post in another collection of posts that have links to the different objectives covered in the 70-505 exam.

Creating a UI for a Windows Forms Application by Using Standard Controls (13%)

You can also find some information on preparing for your exams here, in the actual exam for 70-505. Also errata for the MS Press training kit

 

Thursday 22 October 2009

Windows 7 Released Today!

Well Windows 7 is finally released to general public. Happy days

windows_7Well there is not a lot to say as the press are all over it and the rest of the blogosphere, except well done to the Windows Engineering team. You guys did a great job.

 

 

So in the vein of Windows 7 - 7 little touches to personalise your Win 7 experience.

  1. Some free official Windows 7 themes
  2. If you have dual screen monitors and want to use a fairly large picture as your background on both screens. Its easy!
    • Just on your desktop background set it to tiled
    • PictureFill 
  3. Microsoft Security Essentials to secure your PC
  4. Change your Start menu shut down option
    • Right click on the Windows button and click properties
    • Start
    • Change your power button action to which one suits you
  5. Share with the HomeGroup feature
  6. Play with Aero Shake
  7. Finally watch with Windows Media Centre

Monday 19 October 2009

Installing SyntaxHighlighter 2.1 on Blogger

I just installed SyntaxHighlighter 2.1 by Alex Gorbatchev so that I could improve the readability of my code on this blog. It wasn’t the easiest thing to do and I was getting a lot of JavaScript errors.

To install it, I first downloaded the source files from here and then uploaded them to my web space hosted by Skynet. You can host them wherever you like such as Google Sites

Log into your Blogger account and click on the Layout link. Click on Edit HTML.

Look for the </head> closing tag in your HTML. Just above it add the following code

<script src='[YOURHOST]scripts/shCore.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='[YOURHOST]scripts/shBrushCSharp.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='[YOURHOST]scripts/shBrushCss.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='[YOURHOST]scripts/shBrushJScript.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='[YOURHOST]scripts/shBrushPlain.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='[YOURHOST]scripts/shBrushSql.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='[YOURHOST]scripts/shBrushVb.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<script src='[YOURHOST]scripts/shBrushXml.js' type='text/javascript'/>
<link href='[YOURHOST]styles/shCore.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>
<link href='[YOURHOST]styles/shThemeDefault.css' rel='stylesheet' type='text/css'/>
<script type='text/javascript'>
SyntaxHighlighter.config.clipboardSwf = '[YOURHOST]scripts/clipboard.swf';
SyntaxHighlighter.config.bloggerMode = true;
SyntaxHighlighter.all();
</script>


Replace the [YOURHOST] with the location of your installation on your hosting site. Click preview to verify that you are not getting any JavaScript errors on it.



Now this will allow you to insert syntax highlighting for your code. I removed the ones I didn’t need and you can see all the ones that are available in the scripts directory.



The main issue for me was finding that I had to add the bloggerMode property as this made the entire highlighting work.



You can also download the PreCode plugin for Windows Live Writer which allows you to insert your code formatted into Live Writer

Thursday 15 October 2009

A day in SharePoint hell

Yesterday was my day in the land of SharePoint. It was mostly admin work, doing some upgrades for customers and also some migrations. Nothing out of the ordinary. But it was a day that was filled with issues and trying to fix problems that shouldn’t really have been problems, but as we all know, those of us who work with SharePoint, these little issues have a very quick habit of turning into massive problems.

So lets begin with some issues, causes and resolutions which I learnt in my day in SharePoint hell yesterday

Issue: Gradual upgrade option is greyed out when trying to do a WSS 3.0 install

Cause: The WSS 2.0 farm had the database on a separate SQL Server machine which was using an instance named SharePoint. This caused the installer to think that we were using an MSDE instance and would not allow us to use the gradual upgrade option. I got the information from this post.

Resolution: You cannot rename an instance of SQL server. You can rename the server but not the instance. The options were to uninstall and reinstall SQL Server, install a new instance or find another way. The easiest thing for me to do as WSS was the only thing running on this machine was to create an SQL Server Alias and use that name instead of the instance. This worked. You can get a lot of great information on creating an SQL Server alias from this post. I then changed the WSS 2.0 installation to use the new SQL alias as the default configuration database server and content database server.

I reran the WSS 3.0 installer and the option to do a gradual upgrade was enabled.

Issue: Schema mismatch when trying to do a gradual upgrade.

Cause:  I did a prescan to verify that the upgrade would be ok. Strangely it return 0% and 100% without the usual 10 steps in between but gave no error. It turned out that WSS 2.0 SP3 had been applied but the database version read as 6.0.2.6568 which is SP2. A quick check in the Add/Remove programs in the control panel confirmed that SP3 was applied to the system. So it should have read 6.0.2.8165. All WSS/MOSS version numbers here. So the database versions were out of sync. A quick check revealed I needed to force an upgrade across the farm. So using the command stsadm -o upgrade –forceupgrade the version numbers were now in sync.

I tried again with the gradual upgrade and it returned an error. This time it was pretty simple. When resetting the version numbers, the prescan that was originally done was removed so I had to do prescan again and this time, it returned a number of percentage increments. The gradual upgrade worked after that.

Issue: Could not connect to the config database after it had been moved to a new server

Cause: I moved the config and content databases from one database server to another. When I ran the WSS 3.0 setup wizard we didnt have the password for the original service account so we reset it.

Resolution: Turns out that resetting the password was the problem. By resetting the password without the databases been attached to the farm the hashed values for the account were never updated so the database would not allow us to connect. Originally as I thought this was a security issue, I reset the permissions on all the objects in the database such as views, tables and stored procedures but this didn’t resolve the issue.

I tried to reconnect the original databases to the farm and it gave an error of 997 Encryption/Decryption error which meant that after a couple of hours of trying to figure this out I had to create a new configuration database and set up the original settings again. It also turns out that the advice on this Microsoft knowledge base article is not correct for this. This post provided the more correct information for me.  A possible solution could have been to have been to update the farm credentials if it had been possible.

Issue: Could not see Create or Extend web application in the central administration website

Cause: Logged in to the central admin web site as a non local admin user

Resolution: Logged in to the central admin web site as a local administrator group user

So there you go. That was my day in SharePoint yesterday.

Tuesday 13 October 2009

Windows 7 90-Day Evaluation VHD released

Planning to test Windows 7 but don’t fancy installing it. Microsoft have released a pre configured virtual hard disk (VHD) that can be used in a virtualization system such as Hyper V

Overview

The Microsoft VHD Test Drive Program provides customers with an enhanced server-based software evaluation experience that’s faster, better supported and more flexible. You can now access the entire catalog of pre-configured Microsoft and partner products and solutions in the VHD format and start evaluating and testing today from www.microsoft.com/vhd.
This download helps you evaluate the new features of Windows 7, Windows 7 has better ways to find and manage files—like Jump Lists and improved taskbar previews—to help you speed through everyday tasks. It's designed for faster and more reliable performance, so your PC just works the way you want it to. With 64-bit support, you can take full advantage of the latest powerful PCs. And great features like HomeGroup, Windows Media Center, and Windows Touch make new things possible. For more information about Windows 7, please go to
http://www.microsoft.com/windows/windows-7/.
This is a preconfigured virtual machine set contained within the Virtual Hard Disk (VHD) format. Windows Server 2008 Hyper-V, Microsoft Hyper-V Server 2008, or the R2 versions of these products is required to use this virtual machine. Please refer to the system requirements section for more details.

More info about the Microsoft VHD Test Drive Program

You can download the VHD from here

Sunday 11 October 2009

MCTS ASP.NET 3.5 – 70-562 – Objectives List Part 7

This is the seventh and final post (first, second, third, fourth, fifth, sixth) in another collection of posts that have links to the different objectives covered in the 70-562 exam.

Programming Web Applications (17 percent)

You can also find some information on preparing for your exams here, in the actual exam and some other tips for 70-562. Also errata for the MS Press training kit