Month: March 2010

C# cookbook, 2nd Edition

Some of the “recipes” in this book are proving quite helpful in my attempts to learn everything I need to know to get through the 70-536 exam. There’s a newer version of the book out now, but it’s this older version that I’m using via Safari.
Here are a few of the useful recipes:

  • Recipe 8.6. Using Event Logs in Your Application
  • Recipe 8.11. Implementing a Simple Performance Counter
  • Recipe 8.16. Determining Current appdomain Settings Information
  • Recipe 17.3. Encrypting and Decrypting a File
  • Recipe 17.16. Securing Stream Data
  • Recipe 20.2. Controlling a Service

C# 3.0 Unleashed

I’ve been doing a lot of supplementary reading to try and get myself to the point where I can pass the 70-536 exam. I’ve found a couple of books on Safari that have been pretty useful. C# 3.0 Unleashed: With the .NET Framework 3.5, in particular, has a lot of useful content. I’m putting an Amazon link below.

I link to Amazon frequently on this blog, but I never got around to signing up for an affiliate account, so I just went ahead and did that, so if you buy the book from this link, I’ll make a buck or two. Oh, and I just figured out that ABP was interfering with the fancy Amazon links, so I had to go ahead and tweak that again. I like ABP for blocking the really intrusive ads that some sites have, but I’m finding lately that it’s blocking stuff that I actually do want to see. I may have to look into tweaking it a bit more, to let more stuff through.

progress

I finally got through the security chapter in the 70-536 book.  And I got through chapters 13, 14, and 15 today too, so now I’ve just got one more chapter to go.  After that, I’m going to try getting through a practice test and see how I do on that. 

I have a feeling that I’m probably not going to do well on the practice test.  If that happens, I’ve got a few ideas lined up for reviewing the material and trying to get a deeper understanding.  First, I have access to some online training material from Element K through my ACM membership.  I’ll probably try working through some relevant material there and see if that helps.  Second, I’ve been compiling a list of references to coverage of exam topics in other books I own.  I will probably use that as a guide to do some supplemental reading.

crypto trouble

I just finished reading the Cryptography section of the 70-536 book.  While I do understand, conceptually, how all this stuff works, I have to say that I may be in trouble on the test if I really need to memorize the difference between, say, RIPEMD160 and HMACSHA1.  I can’t think of any reasonable mnemonic device that will help me remember that RIPEMD160 is a non-keyed hashing algorithm, and HMACSHA1 is a keyed hashing algorithm.