To Dev or not to Dev

From 3 August 2008, Durban will be abuzz with Microsoft. With Tech-Ed coming to the ICC there will be a huge crowd assembling every day to come and hear what Microsoft has in store for the next few months, with almost 200 more sessions then before. Behind the scenes a lot of work has gone into making Tech-Ed 2008 one of the best yet.

Microsoft is focussing a lot of attention on communities this year, and community lounge promises to be bigger and better then ever. With more floor space then before and the addition of some new and existing features, we hope to make every community in South Africa come alive. Members from SA Developer.Net and SA Architect.Net will be at the lounge in full force, along with the introductions of a few new communities, and the re-establishment of some existing ones.

Over the next few days we will be introducing some of the features to be seen at the lounge, and we hope to see many existing community members there!

When: Wednesday, 23 July 2008, 18:00-20:30
Venue: I.T. Intellect, Shop 405b Level 3, Musgrave Centre, 115 Musgrave Road, Musgrave
Presenter: Willie Roberts
Topic: Microsoft SharePoint Server 2007 - Overview and Changes
RSVP: Please RSVP by replying to this thread or e-mailing diago at sadeveloper dot net.

Please join use for a look into the world of Microsoft SharePoint Server and what it offers developers, users and corporates. Catering provided by our hosts IT Intellect and lots of opportunities for questions.

Braving a freezing Johannesburg morning, Ruari Plint and his team of MVP's and Community Leads took over 2 of the Microsoft Bryanston auditoriums to present a series of enlightening and eye opening talks regarding Interoperability. The theme is entirely related to how Microsoft Technologies, in particular .Net, can be utilised and used across various platforms, in particular Linux. A group off 55+ individuals decided to brave the weather along with Ruari's team to interact and engage on a technical and conceptual level to look at the various topics covered.

The opening keynote, presented by Ruari Plint and Paulo Ferreira, was a brilliant start to the day. Paulo has a very interesting position within Microsoft, as it is his responsibility to test the stability and workability of non-Microsoft products, both open source and commercial on the Microsoft Server platform. He provided an extraordinary view regarding Microsoft's cooperation agreements with various vendors, and also took the time to clear up and explain some myths regarding the various Microsoft agreements and projects. Ruari also provided an in-depth view of the Microsoft MVP program, and outlined the requirements and processes involved in receiving this award.

As per most of the Microsoft events the Interoperability event provided 2 tracks, covering distinct areas of interest. The sessions where all well presented and attended, with Willy-Peter Shaub, Zlatan Dzilnic, Eben De Witt, Henk ?, Ryan Crawcour and Steve ? providing interesting and fascinating views at various development methodologies and solutions. All the presentation deck will be made available on the SA Architect website shortly. My overall impressions of the event was impressive, and I am glad to be associated with such a dedicated and knowledgeable team who continue to work at making these events possible.

After successfully completing exams 70-315, 70-316 and 70-320 in a 2 day marathon I have finally acquired something to put at the end of my name: MCAD.

This is the one of the few opportunities I will ever take to pat myself on the back.

I seem to be spending a considerable amount of time lately apologising. I am extremely passionate about 3 things in my life: my fiance, my career and my community work. Because my work and community involvement has been drawn together a lot closer since I joined ITI in the beginning of the month, I have been able to get more actively involved in the various aspects of the community world, while being able to mentor others in the field of development, which to me is an exciting and never ending catalyst for change.

Being thrown into the deep with ITI has been a huge learning curve. I am doing well with the training aspect as far as my evaluations are concerned, however adjusting to my colleagues and the processes of the company has become both a physically and mentally draining exercise. I have butted heads with one or two of my colleagues in a short space of time, which is outside the norm for me, and this has started building some insecurity around the way forward for myself. I by no means want to give up on the path I have chosen, but I need to readjust my viewpoints and understanding of people, especially in my new working environment, quickly and quietly.

I do however have some new challenges to take on in the next 2 weeks, including planning of the community lounge for Tech-Ed 2008, held in Durban this year and hoping to draw 2000+ visitors, along with various other fairly big and hopefully exciting community projects, which with the strong support from the Microsoft, ITI and MVP team should get off the ground in the next few months.

This all has however put me in a space I am not used to, where my normal simple and direct understanding of issues has caused me to lose sight of a personal growth process I have been undergoing. A process in which I am attempting to humble myself as a person. I am learning things about myself that will hopefully guide me going forward, and allow me to continue to grow, and hopefully also allow me to become a dependable and respected individual to my colleagues in business and the community.

I arrived in JHB yesterday morning at 7:45. I was strangely not surprised at the roadblock outside the airport and the traffic running from the Airport to the ITI offices, but did however realise I don't miss a moment of it. Effectively I walk to work, as my office is 2 blocks down from my house. I had a few rushed but very productive meetings with Microsoft as well as internal ITI meetings that will be continuing today, addressing various issues.

One of the people on my meeting list was Ruari Plint, MVP Product Manager for Microsoft. I was pleasantly surprised and pleased with the results of the meeting, and found Ruari to be a walking encyclopedia on communities and motorbikes, both intense passions of his. Our initial 1 hour meeting quickly grew into a 2 1/2 hour brain dump on communities and community structures, as well as a long walk down memory lane. Ruari, along with Simon, was the founders of SA Developer.Net a few years back.

Willy-Peter Shaub also introduced me to Ryan CrawCour, the BizTalk Community Lead. We had a fairly quick chat however Ryan did offer to come to KZN and do some talks on KZN, so look out for some dates that will be coming up shortly. Afterwards Willy-Peter, Ruari and myself went to the Baron's in Bryanston for dinner, with a bit of business mixed in. The InterOperability day was big on the agenda, and Ruari had us in stitches with his car stories. I really want to thank Willy-Peter for planning the evening, and for still coming after finishing his deep dive at 18:30, with no sleep the night before.

I must admit being surrounded by them is truly a humbling experience, and I always leave with a feeling of excitement, along with intense knowledge transfer. Today I have a light agenda, flying back to KZN tonight. My parents will be arriving in KZN tonight as well and we have a long weekend planned.

Jeff Attwood and Joel Spolsky started a new initiative called stackoverflow.com. The conceptual idea is for developers to record a question and upload it to the site, and have someone record the answer and respond to these questions. Jeff and Joel will also be recording a weekly phone call between them on various development topics. Both of them quite deeply describe the birth of the idea on their blogs, with Jeff blogging about it here about a week ago and more recently Joel on his blog here. I commend both of these guys for a brilliant idea. I do believe that the gap between developers worldwide is closing dramatically because of the Internet, and I would love to see more free developer resources and ideas coming to light and actually get launched. You can download there first "podcast" from the site, both as an MP3 or RAR.

For every one who uses or follow the SubText project, the development mailing list has been extremely active for the last few days as they are preparing the next release of SubText. From the list mentioned in the mailing list this will be a very nice feature filled release and definitely worth waiting for. I extensively use SubText to run both Diago.co.za and HoneyB.co.za and I am looking forward to implementing the next version. Phil Haack recently joined Microsoft and is part of the MVC team, and talk of the next version of SubText being MVC based is also high on the agenda at the moment. Something definitely worth getting involved in.

If you have any other interesting news from around the web, feel free to leave a comment and mention it.

Since I received my MacBook in December I have been taking the time to use it as often as I can. As with all new things the novelty of owning one wore off after about a 2 weeks, however the usefulness of the MacBook never stopped. My progression to the Mac has been slow however for the last 2 weeks I have been using it as my primary machine, and it has proven its weight in gold during this time.

I initially only used my MacBook for e-mail and web browsing. Taking the time to get to know Leopard, and the various applications that is provided with the Mac. Although Mac Mail has less features the Thunderbird or even Outlook, it is powerful in its simplicity. All my e-mail accounts are easily accessible, along with my RSS feeds. Safari has proven its ground as my browser of choice, with the odd website not able to render due to lack of support. With iChat Google Talk integration I am able to stay in contact, and although Messenger for the Mac is available I have decided to consolidate and only have one instant messenger. Google Talk on the Mac, MSN on Windows.

Due to it's small size I prefer traveling with the MacBook, and after the 4GB RAM upgrade I decided to give Parallels a chance and load a Windows XP Virtual Machine. My main requirement was to run Visual Web Developer for a part time project I am involved in, developed in ASP.Net and C#. With Coherence mode in Parallels all my Windows application are integrated into the Leopard desktop and makes switching between platforms almost invisible. The 4-5 hour battery life from the MacBook is a huge help as well, along with the instant sleep and wake functionality, allowing to move between places without the having to wait. I haven't used my Windows machine for my part time development again since getting everything working on Parallels.

Apple iWorks 2008 has also been broken in nicely, with Pages working brilliantly as a word processor and Numbers providing all the basic spreadsheets requirements I need. Both applications also support the new Office document format and handles most documents mailed to me at a regular intervals quite well. Office 2008 was loaded a bit later since I needed a way to manage my office mail offline while on the Mac, and Entourage connects nicely using Webmail for Exchange, allowing me to stay in touch with the office from my Mac as well. My big disappointment has been that Word for the Mac doesn't support blogging like Word for Windows.

More recently I was onsite at a client and had very limited space to work in, and decided to load the projects I was working on into the Parallels VM, since I can already manage the documentation part through Mac natively. I also found a copy of the Cisco VPN Client for Mac, which allowed me to use the Mac to VPN into remote sites, and with Remote Desktop for the Mac, manage the remote Windows Servers I need access to. Within an hour I was up and running being able to use the Mac for all my day to day tasks, albeit all my development running within Parallels on the Windows XP box.

Michelle and I also received a present from a friend in the form of the Adobe Creative Design Suite, which consists of all the major Adobe products, more specifically Photoshop and Illustrator. Even with the small 13" screen size designing graphics on the Mac is extremely easy and accurate. With the full range of products required for work and play, my MacBook is now officially my everyday machine, with my Acer notebook taking up it's role as major gaming machine, which is already running Vista Service Pack 1.

I am still extremely happy with my MacBook. As a side note, I have found ecto to be my blog editor of choice, allowing me to easily connect to all my various blogs and posts articles seamlessly, directly from the Mac.

Due to Eskom's new load shedding schedule we have been forced to move the 23 April 2008 event to the Thursday, 24 April 2008. The rest of the event details remain the same and the SA Developer.Net forums has also been updated accordingly.

On the 23rd of April we are having another KZN Developer meet at IT Intellect in Musgrave. This is a free event offered to anyone interested in development, young and old, experienced and beginner. For this event we are planning to discuss two interesting subjects, along with the support of SA Architect, to provide the community with a wider range of information.

AJAX Tips & Tricks

Eben De Wit from Microsoft was kind enough to provide me with the notes and content from his AJAX Tips and Tricks talk presented at Tech-Ed 2007. The presentation will aim at providing current developers with a different view at developing AJAX Web Sites. For the more alert there will also be some prizes sponsored by Microsoft.

LINQ and 3 Tier Architecture

Dion Beneke, a local community, has been in contact with Hilton Giesenow (C# MVP) to address the issue of LINQ's effect on 3 Tier Architecture. He will be presenting his finding in a open forum presentation, and also be providing some insight into how LINQ to SQL works. SA Architect has provided us with some awesome prizes to give away during the evening and there input into the subject will make for an exciting discussion.

We will be providing dinner in the form of Pizza & Coke.

Agenda

18:00 - Opening
18:15 - AJAX Tips & Tricks
19:00 - Dinner (Pizza and Coke)
19:15 - LINQ and 3 Tier Architecture

Event Details

Date: 23 April 2008
Venue: I.T. Intellect, Shop 405b Level 3, Musgrave Centre, 115 Musgrave Road, Musgrave, Durban.
Presenters: Dion Beneke and Willie Roberts

If you would like to attend this event please RSVP on the SA Developer.Net Forums here or send an e-mail to diago at sadeveloper dot net.

Before I am allowed to stand in front of a classroom I need to complete my Microsoft Certified Training qualification. To achieve this I need to complete a set of Microsoft courses. Having been in the industry for 13 years now I was busy reviewing the Microsoft courses and decided to compile a list of business relevant exams that will most likely be the exams I would complete for my MCT. However any developer wanting to get certified would most likely find themselves much more prepared and in demand by completing these exams as well.

Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD)

These courses are all based on .Net Framework 1.1. I believe it would be a much better option to investigate the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist track which covers .Net Framework 2.0 upwards. However a few companies I deal with still use 1.1 and these are the exams I would recommend. To complete your MCAD you need to write 2 core and 1 elective exam. Personally I would recommend completing all of them to get the broadest possible exposure.

Please note: I have explicitly listed the C# courses. The VB courses are listed in brackets when available

The complete list of MCAD core and elective courses can be found here. The above list addresses the majority of industry request I receive.

Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer (MCSD)

These courses are also based on .Net Framework 1.1. MCAD is a prerequisite for this set of exams with 4 core and 1 elective exam required to complete the certification. The core exams include the first 3 from the MCAD with one additional core exam. The electives are the same as for the MCAD certification.

The complete list of MCSD core and elective courses can be found here.

Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS)

The MSTS courses are more focused courses. With the wide array of Microsoft Products, the MCTS exams allows specialisation in a particular technology rather then adding more acronyms to the end of your name. These products include .Net, SharePoint, BizTalk, Office, Vista and Server 2008. This track replaces a lot of the previous MCSD, MCSE and MCDST tracks, although these exams are still available.

I will be looking at the developer specific MCTS tracks. I have again based this on the request and requirements I find in the industry working everyday offering the most complete set of skills for success.

MCTS: .Net Framework 2.0 Web Applications

For developers focusing solely on Web Development this is the required track to complete. It covers all the required web technologies. It consists of 2 exams covering ASP.Net and C# or VB.Net.

MCTS: .Net Framework 2.0 Windows Applications

For developers focusing solely on Windows Development this is the required track to complete. It again consists of 2 exams covering C# or VB.Net and the .Net 2.0 Framework.

MCTS: .Net Framework 2.0 Distributed Applications

For developers focussing on

A complete list of MCTS tracks are available here. For further development I would highly recommend the following MCTS tracks apart from the must do tracks listed above for any developer:

• MCTS: SQL Server 2005
• MCTS: BizTalk Server 2006
• All MCTS SharePoint Tracks (Configuration, Application Development)
• All MCTS Windows Mobile Tracks (Applications, Implementing and Managing)

Microsoft Certified Professional Developer (MCPD)

Once you have completed one of the MCTS: Web, MCTS: Windows or MCTS: Distributed Applications you can become a MCPD by completing the following set of exams:

Exam 70-549 requires developers to complete all the MCTS tracks for the .Net 2.0 Framework and provides the MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer certification. This is the same as the MCSD however covers a broader range of platforms and applications. By adding any of the recommended MCTS tracks mentioned earlier in this entry, a complete set of skills can be build to become a successful developer.

Microsoft Certified Trainer

To become a Microsoft Certified Trainer the process is a little more complex. There is three basic steps to becoming a MCT which allows for training of selected Microsoft Products.

1. Acquire a valid MS Certification. Complete list available here.
2. Demonstrate instructional skills.
3. Complete the MCT Application.

Hopefully this list will help others trying to determine which qualification is the right one to follow.

Two new MVP's join the list of current South African MVP's. This list seems to be growing quarter after quarter and I hope to see many more IT professionals, especially Developers get involved in the community.

Well done to the new MVP's:

Zlatan Dzinic (Sharepoint)

Bruce Nicholson (Dynamics CRM)

Also congratulations to the renewed MVP's for this quarter:

Pieter Germishuys (XNA/DirectX)

Hilton Giesenow (Visual C#)

Nicholas Blank (Exchange)

Keep up the hard work and looking forward to seeing you all at the next series of events in and around South Africa.

On the 3rd floor of the Musgrave Center, a group of individuals got together to plan a new and exciting sequence of events. The first of these involves me joining the dynamic team of IT Intellect lecturer from May, in my new role as Development lecturer. I have been passionate about training for some time, having worked closely with SA Developer.Net and the DuT while running student workshops, and am very excited to start exploring a new avenue within my career.

The second event is the rebirth of SA Developer.Net KZN. My work commitments have made it more and more difficult for me to focus on the community, and as my new employer is a major sponsor of SA Developer, my new position will involve actively growing and building the community in the future, and hopefully bring some exciting new opportunities to the KZN region.

All visitors are kindly requested to proceed to the checkout counter and book their seats, because this is just the start of thing to come....

From this year I will be using my main blog at www.diago.co.za for all my up to date information. I am still fully supportive of DotNet.org and all the work Armand and his team is doing and will be contributing a lot more to the Tutorial Centre blog started last year. Feel free to pop on over and add me to your RSS Feeds to keep up to date with the happenings in my world, and the world of technology.

I recently started working with SharePoint 2007 and needed to create a WebPart to allow Single Sign on functionality for various older ASP.Net application. With some help from both Zlatan Dzinic and Steve Oberholzer I was able to build the control fairly quickly. I posted the process and sample code here to hopefully help others having to build WebParts. I am hoping to post some more SharePoint related articles shortly including how to add the assembly to SharePoint. In the meantime keep an eye on Zlatan's excellent blog regarding all thing SharePoint related.