*Legally, I am not allowed to use the above logo, yet, but I will have the certs soon :)*

I gave 70-536 on Monday and 70-526 on Wednesday. Passed ! There is very little material available on these new generation tests. So, here I am trying to compile whatever material I found and used for the little preparation I did.

I haven't used dumps before, so I dont know how that works (and its illegal ;)).

But the following guides will help. Preparation link for 70-536. Michael's guide provides links to most of the topics listed in the MS prescribed syllabus. I suggest going through all these links - some briefly and some in detail. The questions are very much from these sections. You will pass if you have some experience working with .NET 2.0 and if you know the basic details about specific classes, interfaces listed in the syllabus.

Similar guides are available for 70-526 - here and here. But these are not complete. So I took the syllabus as the starting point. With a google firefox window open in parallel, I ran through a lot of these topics. Have tried to add to PublicJoe's good work. The updated 70-526 guide is available - 70-526 Preparation Guide. (Initial links provided by PublicJoe)

 

Does any one use the built in CD Burning wizard in Windows XP? If you add 600 MB of data to the CD, there is one cached image made in some folder on C drive. Ok fine, when you start the wizard to start writing to the CD, XP makes another copy - for some weird reason. This would have already taken around 20 minutes of your time and 1.2 GB of your system drive. When everything is on the hard disk, why cant they burn directly from the hard disk. One cached image of the CD is still fine for performance and to prevent buffer underrun, but i don't understand two copies!

So I found this. Wonderful. An interface similar to Ahead Nero Burning ROM and with all features. Burns DVD's, writes ISO files, create boot disks. Oh and did I mention - its written in .NET and is absolutely FREE.

 

 

Online news aggregator. Rocks. Bloglines is a free service that makes it easy to keep up with your favorite blogs and newsfeeds. With Bloglines, you can subscribe to the RSS feeds of your favorite blogs, and Bloglines will monitor updates to those sites. You can read the latest entries easily within Bloglines.

 

Chip India's article on which technologies can keep you afloat in the job market - the most fundamental requirements of the market. It says

"In today’s job economy, management seeks resilient people with flair in multiple technologies, which indicates that they can cope with current and future development practices."

 

VoIP fighting back ?? Vonage just raised $35M

The time wheel.  I like this...  [via Ottmar Liebert ]

[Via: Critical Section]

 

Intel Processor linup for 2004-05

Intel's move to processors with several cores and the expansion of wireless capabilities with its chipsets. Otellini said Thursday that desktop processors will include this feature beginning in 2005.

"Tanglewood" processor for servers. "Grantsdale" desktop chipset, due in 2004 - will contain a capability to turn the PC into a wireless access point through the use of software - Digital Home strategy. "LaGrande" which will create a secure "vault" to store data; and "Vanderpool" a technology to allow virtual OS processes to run on the same system. In 2004, Intel expects a "quick toggle" to code-names Dothan and Prescott, Intel's first 90-nanometer processors for the mobile and desktop markets. The Sonoma chipset will also include a connector for a light meter OEMs can install on the motherboard. In daylight, for example, the chipset will dim the LCD backlight to save power. In wireless, Intel will sample a chip that combines Bluetooth and 802.11 wireless in 2004, and ship WiMAX silicon, which will provide wireless "last mile" access to the home. In 2004, Intel will also ship a version of its 32-bit Prescott chip as part of the Xeon family, and add a version of its 64-bit Madison processor with 9MB of cache.

 

Tiger vs Longhorn in 2006 - Steve Gillmore talks to Jonathan Schwartz

SG: He sees the opportunity to build apps on top of that infrastructure.
Schwartz: No company has ever monetized Microsoft's infrastructure in the history of Microsoft.

SG: What are the desktop killer apps, not in 5, but 2 years, that will seed that market, and force a migration off Office?
Schwartz: The killer app for this desktop is price, because China and India and El Salvador and Brazil can't afford a hundred dollars per desktop from Microsoft.

SG: How do you combat the Longhorn vision in a time frame that's going to make some difference?
Schwartz: It's called "Tiger." J2SE 1.5 will deliver lightning performance on that desktop. We've already provided a rich client called Java, but Microsoft wasn't so interested in helping us with our deployment. So we've done our own now – we've signed up over half of the PC industry to ship our J2SE. And as we fold 1.5 seamlessly integrated into Mozilla, that will give us not only an optimized Web services execution environment on the client, it will give us a beautiful portability story onto a much cheaper desktop called the Java Desktop.

SG: But so what. If Microsoft goes off and bakes its stuff into 100 million desktops…
Schwartz: I don't look at Longhorn and say "Oh, my god, they've architected a better automobile." I look at them and say "You're trying to improve on a buggy whip." If you're just another end node on the network, what are you going to deliver to it? Office productivity is just a feature. We're over it, done with that. The real issue is: what are you going to do with peer-to-peer streaming of video?

Name me a software business last year that was $6 billion. It's tough to do – database, maybe. And this year, ring tones will be $8-10 billion. Maybe an enterprise app is worth that kind of money. All of the high value systems going forward are going to be consumer systems.

[Via: Microsoft Watch from Mary Jo Foley]

 

Another attempt at preventing music piracy. Lets see how long this one lasts.Wired News: Top Stories.

 

A code smell is a hint that something has gone wrong somewhere in your code.

 

Paul Hounshell has this article about how to develop applications for which plugins can later be written.

 

Excellent primer to what regular expressions are. Complete regex reference in the appendix. Roy Osherove.

 

All sessions from PDC 2003 ...downloadable slides and code.
 

Great idea here. Instead of shuffling between Yahoo! Briefcase, FTP servers and file splitters, just use this to email your big files. When you email a file using a token, the Token software makes your computer a server. I am not sure how well it works across firewalls, but seems like a good idea altogether.

Joel Spolsky's post also announces this as something that we have always needed. The idea is so simple and its surprising that we have overlooked it for so long.

[Update: I guess good things always come at a price. Even though redeeming a token is free (you still need to download the Redeemer - this should be eliminated somehow to make it more usable), creating a token is not. The basic stuff costs $49 and setting up a Token Server is $1000]
 

Never noticed this before ... but quite useful list of tests in various MS technologies.
 

Hanselman links to by Phillip Greenspun:

"Our students this semester in 6.171, Software Engineering for Internet Applications have divided themselves into roughly three groups.  One third has chosen to use Microsoft .NET, building pages in C#/ASP.NET connecting to SQL Server.  One third has chosen to use scripting languages such as PHP connecting to PostgreSQL and sometimes Oracle.  The final third, which seems to be struggling the most, is using Java Server Pages (JSP) with Oracle on Linux.  JSP is fantastically simpler than "J2EE", which is the recommended-by-Sun way of building applications, but still it seems to be too complex for seniors and graduate students in the MIT computer science program , despite the fact that they all had at least one semester of Java experience in 6.170.

<snip/>But the programmers and managers using Java will feel good about themselves because they are using a tool that, in theory, has a lot of power for handling problems of tremendous complexity.  Just like the suburbanite who drives his SUV to the 7-11 on a paved road but feels good because in theory he could climb a 45-degree dirt slope." [Phillip Greenspun's Blog]

 

Joel Spolsky had written this article in August 2000 about software cost estimates and schedules. Some interesting extracts.

[Spolsky] Testosterone-crazed game companies like to brag on their web sites that the next game will ship "when it's ready". Schedule? We don't need no stinkin' schedule! We're cool game coders! Most companies don't get that luxury. Ask Lotus. When they first shipped 123 version 3.0, it required an 80286 computer, which wasn't very common then. They delayed the product by 16 months while they worked to shoehorn it into the 640K memory limit of the 8086. By the time they were done, Microsoft had a 16 month lead in developing Excel, and, in a great karmic joke, the 8086 was obsolete anyway!

He refers to this story of the rise and fall of Netscape by one of Netscape's employees. Extracts from there.

[Zawinski] Why? Because the company stopped innovating. The company got big, and big companies just aren't creative. There exist counterexamples to this, but in general, great things are accomplished by small groups of people who are driven, who have unity of purpose. The more people involved, the slower and stupider their union is.

And there's another factor involved, which is that you can divide our industry into two kinds of people: those who want to go work for a company to make it successful, and those who want to go work for a successful company. Netscape's early success and rapid growth caused us to stop getting the former and start getting the latter.

Make a schedule

13 silver bullets about scheduling (Spolsky)

1. Use MS Excel: (MS Project has too many dependencies)
2. Keep it simple (column and task list based)
3. Features consists of multiple taks
4. Let the programmer make the schedule
5. Pick finegrained tasks: As a rule of thumb, each task should be from 2 to 16 hours. If you have a 40 hour (one week) task on your schedule, you're not breaking it down enough. Time it in hours. Only then can it be considered as well defined.
6. Keep track of original and current estimate for a task: Helps learn from mistakes
7. Update everyday
8. Put items for vacations: Then add the Remaining hours field to estimate time of shipping
9. Add Debugging time: In principle, developers debug code as they write it. A programmer should never, ever work on new code if they could instead be fixing bugs. The bug count must stay as low as possible at all times
10. Add Integration time: Invariably there will be repeated code and parts that need to be cleaned up for the system overall.
11. Add a buffer to the schedule
12. Dont let managers change the estimated time
13. Features are like blocks of wood: You cant shrink features to accomodate them in the time you have. Either include them, or just leave them out for the next release.

 

Google and MapPoint have teamed up to research on a new search by location technology. Other projects running at the Google Labs. Wish they had more frequent updates and a feed for the Zeitgeist.
 

The Law of Leaky Abstractions explained by Joel Spolsky in the most real real-world examples. His example of TCP over IP demonstrates that even though TCP is supposed to completely hide IP and make sure that all transmission from one computer to another takes place reliably and the user is not even supposed to know about IP, sometimes the problems in IP leak through the abstraction and dont let TCP work. One of these situations being “your pet snake has chewed through the network cable leading to your computer”.
 

Eric Maino is going to hold this competition in February.
 

eweek.com has this interesting article on Ellison and his role in Oracle. The future of Oracle and why he is still not ready to name a second in command.

So Oracle's stakeholders—customers, partners, shareholders, and employees—are at the mercy of a nearing-sixty CEO who indulges in high-risk behavior and whose interest in his company is fitful. In late 2002, Ellison spent weeks at a time anchored off the coast of New Zealand, while the eighty-foot yacht that he paid for, Oracle, participated in the America's Cup trials. Early on in the trials, Ellison was a crew member, but the captain, Chris Dickson, yanked him for a more veteran sailor. Ironically, Ellison had elevated Dickson to captain to replace someone else. The Oracle head capitulated meekly to being thrown off the boat, conceding that the captain must prevail.

 

Colt Kwong posted this picture from Hong Kong's attempt to create a new Guiness Book Record with hundreds of people assembling PC's at the same time, same place.

Do I see Windows XP being installed on all those PC's ?? :)

 

Bugs are a part of every programmer's life. Here's what The Jargon Dictionary has to say about bugs.

First the definition of bug

bug: n. An unwanted and unintended property of a program or piece of hardware, esp. one that causes it to malfunction. Jargon Dictionary Reference

Common types of bugs

heisenbug: /hi:'zen-buhg/ n. [from Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle in quantum physics]. A bug that disappears or alters its behavior when one attempts to probe or isolate it.

Bohr bug: /bohr buhg/ n. [from quantum physics]. A repeatable bug; one that manifests reliably under a possibly unknown but well-defined set of conditions.

mandelbug: /man'del-buhg/ n. [from the Mandelbrot set]. A bug whose underlying causes are so complex and obscure as to make its behavior appear chaotic or even non-deterministic.

schroedinbug: /shroh'din-buhg/ n. [MIT: from the Schroedinger's Cat thought-experiment in quantum physics]. A design or implementation bug in a program that doesn't manifest until someone reading source or using the program in an unusual way notices that it never should have worked, at which point the program promptly stops working for everybody until fixed.

aliasing bug (stale pointer bug): n. A class of subtle programming errors that can arise in code that does dynamic allocation.

A more detailed list of bugs

 

Fresh from Computex 2003, courtesy The Inquirer, we have two new rumors surrounding Intel's short-range plans for the successors to its Pentium 4 line and Prescott (wherever it fits in). First, there's news that Intel will be using AMD's 64bit extensions and not their own due to Microsoft:

If you think Intel would eat its own shoes before it adopted AMD64, guess again, it will be compatible with AMD64. If you doubt this, think about one thing, why this is happening. It is not Intel's doing, not by a long shot. While it may use a different name, like the old x86-64, or even Extended x86, it will run all the software that AMD does. Mmmmm, shoes are tasty. So, why is this again? Simple, MS. Microsoft will not support a different 64 bit platform, and frankly I don't blame it, it costs a lot of money to do that. MS gave Intel the choice, support AMD's instruction set, or do without Windows. MS won that battle pretty handily.

This was followed-up two hours later with news about the successors to Pentium 4 - Pentium V/5 and Pentium 6, as well as news that Microsoft's 64 bit OS will be called Windows Elements:

DETAILS HAVE EMERGED of the future design of Intel's Tejas/Pentium V processor, and of how the chip firm will present it to the world. The chip will sample internally at Intel in January 2004 and will take between four to six months to get to market. The Pentium 6 will follow a very similar schedule. The Pentium V is likely to fly along at between 5GHz to 7GHz, have 2MB plus of level two cache, be built on a 90 nanometer process, and have a stackable design. The processor we believe, sits in the LGA 775 pin socket, and above it is a very thin heatsink. But, according to sources close to the firm's plans, another permeable heatsink can sit between this and another microprocessor module, giving a stackable design. The final design of this arrangement is not set in stone. According to this source, and the details have not been confirmed, a module sitting on top could provide 64-bit extensions. And the source claimed, Microsoft is ready to launch a version of Windows called Elements with 64-bit extensions.

What's missing is where this leaves Prescott. Will Prescott be a pre-game Pentium 5 like the Pentium III Katmai was, or will it become a workstation/server fork like the Pentium III Tulatin? My take is that Prescott will be a pre-game Pentium 5, the "coprocessor" 64bit idea won't fly, and that Pentium 6 debut a year after Tejas sounds about right if, and only if, Prescott launches as a Pentium 5 this year in December. As to Windows Elements and 64 bit on the desktop... well, I own a Sun Blade 100. I can tell you from personal experience that a 64 bit CPU means nothing without proper cache and motherboard resources to back it up. ~write-up by IceStorm

 

Very interactive documentation website. Which engine does it use ? The active glossary is annoying though. Can switch it off.

 

Press Win+L to lock your workstation.

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You can rename multiple files all at once: Select a group of files, right-click the first file, and select "Rename". Type in a name for the first file, and the rest will follow.

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Hold down the shift key when switching to thumbnail view to hide the file names. Do it again to bring them back.

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From the View Menu, select "Choose Details" to select which file properties should be shown in the Explorer window. To sort by a file property, check its name in the "Choose Details" in order to make that property available in the "Arrange Icons by" menu.

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To arrange two windows side-by-side, switch to the first window, then hold the Control key while right-clicking the taskbar button of the second window. Select "Tile Vertically".

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To close several windows at once, hold down the Control key while clicking on the taskbar buttons of each window. Once you have selected all the windows you want to close, right-click the last button you selected and pick "Close Group".

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You can turn a folder into a desktop toolbar by dragging the icon of the desired folder to the edge of the screen. You can then turn it into a floating toolbar by dragging it from the edge of the screen into the middle of the screen. (It helps if you minimize all application windows first.)

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To organize your Favorites in Explorer instead of using the Organize Favorites dialog, hold the shift key while selecting "Organize Favorites" from the Favorites menu of an Explorer window.

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In Internet Explorer, hold the Shift key while turning the mouse wheel to go forwards or backwards.

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In some applications (such as Internet Explorer), holding the Control key while turning the mouse wheel will change the font size.

 

Have you ever needed an email .. NOW? Have you ever gone to a website that asks for your email for no reason (other than they are going to sell your email address to the highest bidder so you get spammed forever) ?

Welcome to Mailinator

Its no signup, instant email. Here is how it works: You are on the web, at a party, or talking to your favorite insurance salesman. Whereever you are, someone (or some webpage) asks for your email. You know if you give it, you'll be spammed. On the other hand, you do want at least one email from that person. The answer is to give them a mailinator address. You don't need to sign-up. You just make it up on the spot. Pick jonesy@mailinator.com or bipster@mailinator.com - pick anything you want (up to 15 characters before the @ sign).

Later, come to this site and check the email for that account. Its that easy. Mailinator accounts are created when mail arrives for them. No signup, no personal information, and when you're done - you can walk away. The emails will automatically be deleted for you after a few hours.