- On fire shift. Waiting to do a great cross fit workout. #
- Wow, cross fit training was great. Now I am really sore. Checking email and studying. #
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Mar 302009
- Going out for dinner, just my wife and I. It will be nice to chat and eat great food, without worrying about the kids. #
- I will do some .NET study and finish my cardiovascular CBT as well. What a combination? #
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So, I decided to take a break from my formal studies. I will blog a little about that at another time. But given this break, I always like to look at technology and see what is changed. I have found the best way to do that is through studying, building a demo using the technology and then sitting for an exam. So, I have done Microsoft exams way back when I was just starting to get into technology in the military and then later it became a part of my job as an adult technical instructor.
I looked at my current certifications and notice that the whole MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer) certification track has changed significantly. I looked at the upgrade path and whilst I was interested in that, I only wanted to bite off small chunks at a time.
At the Microsoft learning site, I came across the following:
The first exam that I need to do to get the ball rolling is 70-536. I ordered the book from Microsoft Press and look at the relevant topics I need to master in order to be ready for the exam. The book and exam seem to state the importance over:
- Develop applications that use system types and collections
- Validate input and extract data with regular expressions
- Create services and multithreaded applications
- Implement code-access security and role-based security
- Implement serialization to read and write complex objects
- Leverage legacy code using interoperability
- Monitor and troubleshoot applications
- Create applications for a global audience
It looks like I have got my time cut out for me with this information to adsorb. However, after having a quick flick through the book it appears that a lot of the content is similar to .NET 2.0, so I feel it will be revision. But as I progress through this certification journey I will blog out new an important technology features.
Mar 282009
Wow, it has been a busy last two weeks in the world of MVC. Microsoft released the version 1.0 release of ASP.NET MVC.
The download location is available at here.
Here is an example of an MVC application sample using the northwind database.
What interested me the most when using MVC was to imbed a Silverlight application into it.
Tim Heuer over on his blog had already done it. Which is here.
I have also ordered from Amazon the latest MVC book (Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0) as well, which is on my recommended books section.
So, over in the Ruby on Rails camp. The 2.2.2 release is mainstream. I have started to play with it. A good reference is Agile Web Development with Rails, Third Edition, in the recommended books section on this blog. An interesting aspect to the reference is the use of passenger and internationalization.
I will start some development projects to call out specific items I find on both of these MVC technologies.
Mar 282009
This week I attended a silverlight workshop. It was very interesting to see how Microsoft has taken on the design and programmatic world and combined them together.
The workshop primarily was working with Blend 2, though we got demonstrations in Blend 3 as well.
What I did like is the different styles that could be easily added to the controls within the Silverlight/Blend environment.
Here is some examples of how the controls can be styled:
This image is courtesy of http://blogs.msdn.com/corrinab/
To do this you need to create resources in the top of the Page.xaml, and then it is a matter of referencing them. Here is an example:
<!-- Resources -->
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="BaseColorBrush" Color="Tomato"/>
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="BorderBrush" Color="#FF333333"/>
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="ForegroundBrush" Color="#FF333333"/>
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="HoverBrush" Color="WhiteSmoke"/>
<SolidColorBrush x:Key="HyperlinkBrush" Color="Tomato"/>
Other aspects of the workshop was understanding how animations work by creating a storyboard.
It was a long and enjoyable week and has given me a new appreciation to creating and building Silverlight applications.
- getting ready for work… #
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Mar 152009
Welcome to my blog, I will try and keep this up to date as much as possible. To get real information you can also look at my tweets as well.
Thanks.
