MS certification path

I had mostly made up my mind yesterday to take the ASP.NET 2.0 test, 70-528, next. I have the book for that one, and the one after that, 70-547, both bought used (and cheap) from Amazon.
However, I just got exam vouchers for 50% off (and a free second take) that are only good for the tests on the VS 2008 / ASP.NET 3.5 track: 70-562 and 70-564. So, I’ve decided that the VS 2008 path is the better way to go. (And as added incentive, the vouchers expire on June 30, so I need to stick with a pretty good pace and get through them by then.) I went out to Borders this morning and bought the 70-562 book, so I can get started with it in earnest on Monday.
The 70-564 exam is going to present a challenge though. If you look at the “preparation materials” tab on the web page for this exam, you see the following:

Classroom Training
There is no classroom training currently available.
Microsoft E-Learning
There is no Microsoft E-Learning training currently available.
Microsoft Press Books
There are no Microsoft Press books currently available.

Hmm, this could be a problem. I do have the book for the VS 2005 equivalent to this exam, so I could start with that, and supplement it with various stuff off MSDN and from other ASP.NET 3.5 books, but it won’t be as straightforward as having an official exam study guide.

passed 70-536

I passed 70-536 today! This was my first Microsoft exam, so I wasn’t entirely sure what to expect.
The questions on the exam weren’t much different from the questions on the practice exam included with the book. I was somewhat worried that the actual test would bear little resemblance to the practice tests, and/or be much harder than the practice tests.
Getting through the preliminaries at the test site was pretty smooth, all things considered. I don’t know why, but I was expecting the test center bureaucracy to be a bit worse than it was. They were actually pretty friendly and professional.
So, all in all, not a bad experience.
I still haven’t completely decided if I should take the ASP.NET 2.0 or the ASP.NET 3.5 test next. I have the book for the 2.0 test, and I’m going to be more familiar with that, so that’s the easy way to go. On the other hand, the 3.5 certification would look a little better on my resume.

Take Command v.11


TC 11 2010-04-06
Originally uploaded by andyhuey

I’ve been using products from JP Software for years, since back in the days of DOS. Their original product, 4DOS, was a replacement for command.com, the old MS-DOS command shell. Their current product, Take Command, is basically a replacement for CMD.EXE, with a bunch of enhancements and random bells & whistles. I hadn’t upgraded in about three years, so I went ahead and did that today. It’s a very nice program, with the enhanced command line embedded in a file browser. Maybe I’ll post some more details when I get a chance to play with it some more. I’m conflicted on whether or not I should invest too much time in learning the new stuff in TC. From a career standpoint, I should probably concentrate on PowerShell. But honestly, I know I can get stuff done faster and easier with TC.
Oh, and I took the screen shot shown here with Jing, which I haven’t used in quite a while. Since the last time I used it, it seems that they’ve added the ability to upload your screen shots to Flickr, Twitter, and Facebook. Nice.

keeping busy

This will be my first full week unemployed.  I spent time today taking care of a bunch of random things, including entering a bunch of Merrill Lynch statements into Quicken.  They’d been piling up since April 09, so it was almost a year’s worth.  I got through to December, so I’ve gotten to the end of 2009, at least.

When I look at my overall financial picture in Quicken, it doesn’t look too bad.  Unemployment won’t be a big problem for the time being.  My goals for this week include catching up on paperwork (like those Merrill statements), doing whatever I might need to do on my parents’ estates, and studying for my first .Net exam.  I may try to take that exam at the end of this week, if I think I’m ready.

Allergies

Happy Easter.  My allergies have been bothering me a lot lately.  (At least I think it’s allergies.)  I took a generic Claritin last night before bed, but it really didn’t help much.  This morning, I ran out to Walgreen’s and picked up some generic Zyrtec (Wal-Zyr).  I just took one, and I sure hope it works.

WonderCon 2010

Packed show floor image – WonderCon 2010 draws in S.F. (photos) – CNET News

Well, I’m not in SF at WonderCon this weekend. Maybe next year.

Nor did I buy an iPad today, though I did go to the Apple Store with a friend when he picked up his. I’ve almost justified getting myself an iPad, under the theory that attending WonderCon would have cost much more than an iPad, between the plane fare and the hotel, so I can spend some of the money I would otherwise have spent on WonderCon on an iPad. Yeah, I know the logic doesn’t quite hold up.

fun with virtualization

One of the estate-related items on my to-do list has been to get rid of my Dad’s old PC. It’s an old Dell Windows XP Home machine. Not too old, but not really worth keeping. I did, however, want to keep his files, of course. My brilliant plan was to do a P2V migration on it, and set it up as a virtual machine either on my dektop PC (using Virtual PC) or on my Mac (using VMWare Fusion). To that end, I downloaded the Sysinternals Disk2vhd tool and the VMWare converter. I ran both on the PC, just in case.

Now, the one thing I forgot with all this is that Dad’s copy of XP was preinstalled on his PC by Dell, which pretty much means that you can’t run it on anything other than an actual Dell PC. (I should have remembered this, since we ran into the same problem at work some time ago, but I completely forgot.) So, I wound up with two virtual hard drive images which were both perfectly fine and perfectly useless.

I tried working around this by entering a valid, non-Dell, XP product key at the activation screen, but that didn’t work. And I tried doing a repair install of XP, but that didn’t work either. Then, I came up with the bright idea of upgrading the VPC to Vista. That also didn’t work, since you can only do an upgrade install if you boot into XP first, and run it from there, not if you boot from the Vista DVD. And I can’t get past the XP login screen.

I can think of a few possible ways around this, but the whole thing was starting to get frustrating, so I punted and went back to Dad’s computer and just ran the Files and Settings Transfer Wizard on his account. I then restored his files & settings to a new account on an existing XP VPC on my desktop machine. That seems to have worked out OK. I just used the defaults on the FAST wizard, which seems to have sucked up quite a bit of data, including a bunch of stuff that can’t possibly be necessary, but I guess that’s OK.

I still have the option of going back to Dad’s (real) PC and doing an upgrade of some kind on it, either to Vista or maybe from XP Home to XP Pro, so it’s not using the Dell-specific install anymore. Then, I’d have to go back and run the P2V tool(s) on it again. I think I’m OK with the way things are now, though.