Thoughts on my mind as I get ready for upgrading my MCAD .NET to MCPD Web...

Getting certified was something that I got interested in doing not long after finishing my degree at university back in 2005. Given that I was involved with Microsoft stuff and .NET at the time my choice of certification was to be Microsoft Certified and more specifically Certified in .NET so in 2006 I started working towards the Microsoft Certified Application Developer (MCAD) .NET certification and had that completed, this of course was in .NET 1.1.

I personally find a lot of value in getting certified, I think other than the prestige and self satisfaction you get from certification they provide good awareness of products and technologies and with new technologies coming out everyday it becomes very very hard to keep up with them if you don't use them on daily basis as there are probably many areas you never get to use, so the alternative can be working towards a certification. I think for me these are two reasons I like getting certified: personal satisfaction/prestige (whatever you want to call it really) from certification as well as awareness of new technologies, being aware of what is possible can help in decision making when you get to a situation where you need to get something done and are looking for a solution.

Nic (who is an MCP by the way) is one person I know who questions what certifications imply about developers who have them (this is specific to Microsoft Certifications AFAIK) and he may have good reason for that. The reason is, he has come across several MC** developers who happened to be not so great as developers or not as good as non certified developers. He can probably say more on this one...

So this gets me back to the question of this post, should people get certified or not, and what value will it add? I've already given my thought on this one from my perspective so I would personally like to continuously get certified for the reasons I mentioned above.

I don't think that MC** (dev track) certifications should be used as an indicator of whether or not you are a good programmer or developer but as an indicator that you are familiar with what the framework ...etc can do and how to get started on things. Even if you've done all the labs ...etc this doesn't really mean you are a good developer but means you know how the code in a certain area works.

The above issue has been improved slightly in the new generation of MS certifications, with .NET 1.1 pretty much all material was very specific to the framework and surrounding technologies but with the .NET 2.0 a good chunk of the exam covers some generic concepts (within the context of MS technologies and products) such as unit testing ...etc.

Another way to maybe think about this is asking this question: does having a degree with IT/CS majors imply you are a good developer? The answer is probably not still.

Next month I'm going to be re locating to Melbourne and as a result I have handed over the .NET User Group leadership today as announced by Darryl. It has been a great couple of years since taking over the user group from Peter Jones. I really enjoyed running the group during that time and regret to be handing it over but I kind of had to

The new user group leader is Christopher Fairbairn whom you might have seen presenting at the 2008 Summer Road Trip that was held earlier this year. So from now on Chris will be the primary contact for the .NET user group and Bryn will be helping as was the case in the past two years.

I've just introduced a new blog category to my blog topics Business. So in this category you will find some of my personal thoughts on business related things. Despite being at an early stage in my career, the idea of running a business at some point during my career journey is something I'm interested in doing. At this stage I'm not sure when that might happen, but I guess I'll know eventually. Below are some initial thoughts on what I think makes a good business. This category is basically my thoughts regarding things I think I've learnt from observing what some of the great business leaders are doing out there.

To have a good business I think you need to have the following things.

- A good idea
- Money to fund that idea
- A great team of people to build that idea
- A way to get the word out about your idea

- So what defines a good idea? How do you know if your idea is good or whether or not it makes sense and is worth pursuing.

From what I've learnt: A good idea is building a product or a service that fills a need by someone else or helps make what they do more efficient. So in order to have a good idea one would need to recognise gaps in products or services around them. I think if you can be good at identifying gaps then you've got it!

Ok so you think you've identified a gap that you can fill, but need assurance that it makes sense. Here's another thing you can do. LEARN FROM OTHERS. A really easy way to test an idea you have to know whether or not it makes sense is to run it by someone who's been there done that. After all, why make mistakes and learn the hard way when you can get advice from others who've done it before. There are a lot of people out there who can give advice and help one find flaws in their ideas very quickly.

- How do we get money to fund an idea?

Assuming we've gone through step one and now have our idea. The question becomes how do we fund it. Well I guess there only 2 options, either we have enough Capital to fund it ourselves or the need to borrow. In most cases one will need to go with Option 2 and borrow money. This can be done by getting investors on board, borrow money from a bank, floating a company ...etc. I think no matter which option one chooses you need to do one thing convince OTHERS (the investors) that you have a good idea. Note that getting through step one you convinced YOURSELF that your idea is good.

To convince investors that you have a good idea you need to have them take you seriously. I believe this can be done in the following steps.

- Build your brand (portfolio) and your reputation.
- Have a business plan that describes your idea and goals and how you plan to achieve them.
- Approach people who can help while backing yourself with the above and get started from there.

To be continued...

I was spending some time today trying to figure out how to turn DasBlog categories into technorati friendly links because it seems Technorati doesn't pickup the default dasblog category URLs, I've come across some posts that talk about creating custom macros to display digg it ...etc links at the footer and this I came across this link here that has a list of tons of existing dasBlog Macros.

In the link above I found that there already exists a <%TechnoratiTags%> tag that you can use, this will display your categories at technorati tags instead of the default category links.

I've also noticed that if you use Windows Live Writer, under the insert section on the right you have an option to insert Technorati tags and others...

Nice!

So it's been a week since Christchurch's first ever Code Camp, Boot Camp 2007, came to an end. It was an AWESOME couple of days. We were worried about the weather a day before the event due to forecast but it turned out to be fantastic!

We had a Boot Camp theme for this event as you know and speakers and helpers (the Boot Camp commanders) got to wear army look T-shirts and dog tags which I thought were really cool. The event had a total of 17 sessions spread over 2 streams presented by 13 speakers listed below, I've linked to the ones that I know have blogs so you can visit their blogs for information and resources if you like...

- Darryl Burling 
- John-Daniel Trask
- Pat Martin
- Nathan Mercer
- Andrew Tokely
- Edwin Dando
- Ivan Porto Carrero
- Jeremy Boyd
- Chris Crowe
- Ivan Towlson
- Bryn Lewis
- Adam Cogan
- Evan Williams

I will be posting more details about presentation slides ...etc soon. All attendees should receive an email with links ...etc over the next week. In the mean time, thanks to those of you who attended and those who helped and a BIG thanks to Peter for bringing code camp down to the south island ... It was a great event and we look forward to future ones.

The planning for the the first Code Camp in Christchurch is moving along pretty well but the main thing we need for this event to succeed is YOU, if you have not registered for the event already please do so. Below are updated details on the event.

TO REGISTER GO TO: http://www.codecamp.net.nz

Trimble Navigation, Birmingham Drive, Addington, Christchurch. Map here

Speakers are confirmed and sessions are close to finalised.

Chris Auld (Intergen, MVP)
Jeremy Boyd (Mindscape, MVP)
Darryl Burling (Microsoft)
Chris Crowe (Trimble, MVP)
Edwin Dando (Clarus)
Peter Jones (Intergen, MVP)
Bryn Lewis (Clarus)
Pat Martin (Microsoft)
Nathan Mercer (Microsoft)
Ivan Porto-Carrero (Xero)
Andrew Tokeley (Intergen)
Ivan Towleson (ECN Group)
John-Daniel Trask (Mindscape)
Evan Williams (HP)

View full speaker details here

We have plenty of sessions chock full of critical information.

View full session details here. (More coming soon).

AND ...
Free lunch
Spot Prize
Competitions
Camp Fire Dinner (Saturday night - about $30 each).
Lots more!

TO REGISTER GO TO: http://www.codecamp.net.nz

I've been using Sauce Reader for reading all my feeds till now and I want to move on but can't decide on what to use. What is everyone using out there.

The only 2 annoying things with Sauce Reader were it's a desktop thing so cant read all my feeds from anywhere without my computer, and a few crashes every now and then, other than that, I really liked using it.

I know of several other replacements to Sauce Reader such as FeedDemon that I can try, but I was thinking of an online reader, and so far, I am not impressed with any.

Here are the ones I tried and my thoughts about them.

Live.com : Can import my opml file and read feeds there but there are 3 problems.

1) Only partial content is shown

2) Can't read comments on posts

3) to read more you have to popup a new window 

BlogLines : Better than live .com but I don?t like the fact that

1) I don't like the frame set, the frame divider is far too thick

2) Again can't read comments on posts

NewsGator Online : Only tried the beta AJAX version of it. Better than the above two but

1) Seems a little bit slow

2) Again even though it does seem to have a comments section at the bottom it doesn't seem to grab any feed comments!

Google Reader : Not impressive at all, well not to me anyway, but it seems a lot of people like it out there. Problems:

1) I don't like the UI, colours are just bad, consistent with GMail colours but used the wrong way around I think.

2) Comments, comments, comments, where are they, why are ALL online readers I've tried missing comments.

Are online readers a bad idea? Is there anything better that I haven't tried out?
It looks like I might give up the whole online RSS reader thing and just stick with something like FeedDemon.
If I have to choose from the above I would go for the NewsGator one, but still it feels like the best of the worst to me.

I'm not sure why I haven't done this previously but I'm now registered on Linked In! Will add the link to my blog soon, I'm slowly adding people I know to my list but you could make this easier for me by adding me too

I just noticed that Rod has started blogging about Xero.

I cant think of what more to say in this post so go read what Rod has to say about Xero.

I've done a few modifications to the look and feel of my blog - hopefully to the better, and there's still a bit more to come. Blog now has a new background colour and a reorganized and rearranged right side, removed the Google/Amazon ads for now. They were cluttering the area I think, also added a little bio about myself and created a new feedburner feed.

Please do subscribe to the new Feed Url : http://feeds.feedburner.com/DanDotNet

I hope the changes are nice!

The first MS NZ event for 'O7 after the launch is coming next month, lots of awesome content and also some nice give aways and all for just $199. Details are here

I even noticed that JD - 2006 Blogger of the year award winner -will be co presenting with JB this year. Nice stuff JD. The next generation of Microsoft tech geeks is emerging. Looks like me & JD are leading the wave but in slightly different ways (Shameless self promotion here )

I'm sure JD would agree this is just the beginning!

Just read this on Computer World. I have been wondering about this a few years ago thinking that it would be nice if it does happen.

I guess we will be seeing more softies in Christchurch on regular basis now. Nice... 

I just noticed that Lukas's blog is back up and running again.  His new blog is on http://blog.svoboda.co.nz and the RSS feed is here 

Welcome back online Lukas.

Right so it seems the hot topic of today is TradeMe's launch of their Job listing service... This actually had me start thinking about the following. What happened to innovation? It seems to me that a lot of companies in NZ and world wide see others doing something and then going, that looks like a cool thing to do we should do that too... and then they do and we end up with multiple offerings of very very similar services, so whats the point there? Maybe there's something I don't get, but unless there is a significant difference I just dont see the point.

Here are some examples in different areas.

Maps: Wises, Zoomin and now Yellow Pages too
Auctions: Trademe,Zillion and 2TradeIt
Jobs: Seek, Job Stuff and now TradeMe

And some global Examples

Google, Windows Live Search
iPod, Zune...etc

I'm not denying that new market entrants can help bring innovations on existing products/services but I really think that companies should invest in new ideas and new offerings rather than go outside what they do best to offer services already offered by others.

But who knows, maybe I got it all wrong!!

Remember to Vote For Me!

It's that time of the year again. The NZ.NET blog competition is back!

Vote For Me

This just caught my attention, was looking at my blog this afternoon and I spotted the following:

I couldnt help but clicking the add to see where it will take me. I ended up on MS Germany's Visual Studio / Visual Web developer's page. I wonder why MS Germany are using Adwords!!

Following this

Apple have just released a piece of software that allows people to run XP on their intel based machines.

All future versions of the Mac OS will include this software.

More details here

I read in The Press yesterday that ICANN will be meeting in Wellington from 25-31 March and that one of the things that will be in discussion is the registration of the .xxx domain extension. Apparently the Bush Administartion is trying to stop the realization of this domain extension. For the following reason.

"Over 6000 people made their objects by either E-mail or a letter. They are afraid the new .XXX domain extention will legitimize the porno industry."

I'm not sure what legal consequences the realization might cause but IMO having the extension available will really make things better. The porno industry will exist regardless of it being legal or not and content will remain available on the internet. So by having the extension made available, perhaps this could improve things in the following.

- A new law could be created to make it illegal to have adult content in any non .xxx domain
- Given the above occurs, all adult content will have to exist under the above extension
- Given that becomes the case, it will be very easy to block adult websites hence resulting in a safer internet for kids ...etc

It looks like Chris Auld has started his live blogging from Las Vegas for  MIX06. Keep an eye on his blog for live info on whats going on there.

Here's his first post and I'm sure there's more to come..

Ok this was known to be possible, but it wasnt known how. Well now a solution has been posted, you can find it here

Nice! Here's a picture showing XP on Mac

So far I'm very happy with my Vista experience, I've managed to installed WinFX and VS 2005 last night and everything went smoothly with no issues during setup. Will post more as I start playing with WinFX a bit.

One thing I didnt talk about in my previous post of the things I liked, is the way the 'All Programs' menu behaves now. The changes are great. If you recall the old programs menu, you'll remember that you could endup having 3 to 4 panels open and if you slip your hand in the last panel, outch the entire panels would collapse and you have to select the menu,the submenu,thesubmenu of the submenu...etc

The new Tree like expand and collapse behaviour in Vista helps avoid this and it is a really good change I think.

I've also found this great review of the current Vista build and all the previous builds are there too on the site.

There has been a few posts about the new Geekzone blog feature lately.
Want to know what people think.

Mauricio, Tim , Darryl and Nic all posted about this.

I was lucky to get no 9!

Still not convinced you should try it, then here are my comments!

"A security association is reporting what it says is the first virus that can pass from a PC to a mobile device and then erase files."

I guess with viruses targeting new markets in the near future, we might see lots of antivirus software moving there in the future too... I would have never thought I might be running say Norton or McAFee on my Smartphone but who knows; if viruses can go mobile then surely antiviruses will too!

See the article here

With the latest release of the Windows Vista CTP build this week. I was doing some recap with some of the changes made in the history of windows and one of the things that I didnt pay much attention to lately is the Windows 'start' button. Most of you will probably know that the start button was a big talk within HCI for it's inconsistency with user actions - clicking a button called start to shut down - end - a computer ... etc. With a bit of search I found the following link with all the windows buttons from Windows 95 to Vista build 5259 (2 builds back I think) but the button in this build is still the same. So by the looks of it, in the last 3 builds of vista, including the one released this week 5308 the word 'start' is finally no longer going to be present. I think this will make HCI guys happy now

For a recap on the start button in the past 10 years I've included the images I found in the link above.

Windows 95/98/NT 4	Windows 2000/ME
Windows XP Build 2250	Windows XP Build 2257
Windows XP Build 2410	Windows XP Beta 1
Windows XP Beta 2	Windows XP
Windows Server 2003	Windows Media Center 2005
Windows Vista Build 3683	Windows Vista Build 3718
Windows Vista Build 4008	Windows Vista Build 4015
Windows Vista Build 4051	Windows Vista Build 4083 (64-bit)
Windows Vista Beta 1	Windows Vista Build 5219
Windows Vista Build 5259-5308

Watched this on the news today and had to check it out. Telecom are finally upgrading the Broadband plans. Yay! Now it's taken quite a while for this to happen I think but it's finally happening, and I believe there is now room for it to be even better. The even better news - for businesses that is - is that the plans and prices are the same for both!!.

To see the range of the new plans offered by Telecom go here - the plans are effective from April this year.

Ok so on the same day IE 7 beta 2 preview is released a bug is found!! According to PCWorld here. An independent researcher only needed 15 minutes to find to find the first bug in the beta 2 preview.

The interesting thing is that "Ferris's discovery is one of the quickest such bug-findings on record". I personally dont think this is bad news tho. I mean the software is not even a beta yet... and discovering bugs early leads to having a better, less vulnerable final product.

More details on the bug can be found here.

Update: here's a post from the IE blog regarding the issue.

Here's one of the funniest emails I've received in a while. So thought I'd share

"A man joined a big multi national company as a trainee. On his first day, he dailed the kitchen and shouten into the phone:"Get me a cup of coffee, quickly!" The voice from the oder side responded: "You fool; you've dialed the wrong extension! Do you know who you are talking to?" "No" replied the trainee."It's the managing director of the company, you idiot!"

The trainee shouted back: "And do you know who YOU are talking to, you IDIOT?" "No!" replied the Managing Director angrily.

"Thank God!" replied the trainee and put down the phone.

A new version of the GPL - the first major revision in the last 15 years - is coming soon. A draft was recently released here. According to Computerworld the changes are designed to designed to "address two increasingly important issues in the software industry: software patents and DRM (digital rights management). " Will be interesting to see the outcome of this...

See the full article here

Here's something nice to have a look at as the year 2005 comes to end. I came accross this list of the 50 greatest gadgets in the past 50 years on PCWorld recently.

There should be a lot more gadgets joining this list in the next 50 years I think. It's also interesting that Sony has 7 presences among those 50! Good job Sony!

So you've probably heard of TradeMe and you might have heard of Zillion but have you heard of 2tradeit ? I never have but saw it today on the sponsored links of my blog. Will check it out and post about it again sometime soon.

John Downs a 4th year Comp Sci and Psychology student in 2006 will be the next Student Ambassador for Auckland University and has recently started blogging. If you follow the NZ.NET student list you may have read his introduction of himself, but if not you can see it here

Please drop by his blog and say hi. I'm sure John will be a great successor for the previous Auckland Student Ambassadors.

Welcome to blog world John, hope to see you blogging more soon.

Was just reading about a new tool released by Microsoft Research; SNARF; this tool integrates with your email client in order to allow you to sort (social sort) your email based on how often you send or receive emails from contacts. Sounds like a nice idea to me, will try it out now.

To get it go here

And for the article on PCWorld about it, see here

Will post my experiences soon...

Ferrit is now online at last. Initial rumors (at least the ones I heard) were that it will be an alternative to TradeMe. But it doesnt look anything like TradeMe yet. It looks more like a supersized online shop to me - not a bad idea either - perhaps with more products available for sale it could kick off well.

Only think I dont like from my first impressions is that they site display is a bit too busy.

Update: ok, I've just registered an account with Ferrit to check what benefits members get, well the main thing is that you can create a list of items you like and then get redirected to the store whom the product belongs to so that you can buy it. The list is also handy if you want to share it with friends and family (perhaps the reason for this is for people to find Christmas gifts ...etc for others) again not a bad idea.

What I find interesting is that you cannot checkout items into a shopping cart and pay for them and get them shipped to you, so it seems ferrit is more like half an online shop. I expect another benefit of the registration is being spammed  by the retailers participating in Ferrit (hopefully this wont happen!)

Update 2: Just refering to that last paragraph above, Ferrit will be introducing sales and more in later phases of Ferrit. Tim posted about this before here

Microsoft is now developing RSS into making it a two way street. I firstly read about this on Ray Ozzie's (MS CTO) blog here and now just found an article about this on PCWorld.

"Microsoft is extending the popular RSS 2.0 Web syndication format to make it "multidirectional," allowing it to be used for synchronizing information such as contacts and calendar entries across different applications, the company says.

Web sites that support Really Simple Syndication (RSS) feeds. When content on a site is updated, the RSS feed informs the subscriber, often with a summary of the updated content and a link to it."

See the full article here

I just read that Ray Ozzie, Microsoft's CTO has started blogging. It's nice to see senior people at large corps like MS blogging.

I'm sure his blog will be an interesting read. See it here and here is a little bio of Ray.

This looks really funky!, probably not as good as the ipod family yet, but looks very stylish, should be seeing more of it soon I reckon.

For details about it see the Sony website here

Nigel blogged about the new generation of Microsoft Certifications here. It's interesting that they are becoming more focused on skills ...etc

This presents me with a wee problem though, I am currently studying for MCAD and am not too far from sitting the first exam.

Now the question is, should someone like me go through the entire 03 MCAD certificate or should I do the first exam and then start focusing on the new generation stuff??

I think I will go for both! Is that a good thing to do, what do you guys think?

Nic blogged about the "How much is your blog worth" tool recently, showing that his blog is worth around 14k, not bad!

Now trying this on my own blog shows that mine is only worth $0 :-(

I guess I should attempt to post more regularly and try and have posts that are of value to my blog readers...

Here's a promise from me to post at least once every week and also post something of value. If you feel that I'm not keeping my promise, please do let me know.

I know this is hard to do, but it's worth the challenge.

To find out how much your blog is worth in money see here

Well quite a few blog writers have been quiet lately including myself - cant find anything to post about at present and seems others have similar problems, most of the blogs I read have been quiet lately....

Hopefully new content will come soon!

So Telecom had their 3G network released for a while now and Vodafone have recently followed with theirs. Now there are a lot of good things that come with the 3G network, not all necessary features but all are cool!

Now like me you may have thought that a Smartphone does everything one might ever dream of doing (at least IMO it does everything I need) so I confidently went to Vodafone and asked someone if Smartphones are 3G enabled and she said no, then I was like I'm sure they are capable of it so will they be in the future and she denied saying that this wont be the case with the current models.

So, conclusion, there are things a smartphone can't do :( :(

James Carpinter, the current Student Ambassador and my successor as a Student Ambassader, has now started blogging. He is currently looking for someone to replace him as a Student Ambassador as he is leaving university this year.

Are you a student at Canterbury who is interested in this then let him know or let Paul Lo the Academic Advisor at Microsoft know.

The program is really great and there is a lot you can get out from it.

Got any questions about the experience? ask me or ask James

Also, I took the Student Ambassador role one step further and was involved this year with the first Student Advisory Board for version two (which is now live) of theSpoke. There is a big chance they will be arranging a new board next year, so if you think this will be an interesting challenge, then stay tuned and keep an eye on Mario's Blog