Wow. It's been over 6 months since my last blog post! I'm sure this will change in 2009 and here goes the first post this year, and I'm sure many more will come. I received the email below on Tuesday and for some reason it does not surprise me! What's seems a bit strange is that the news did not seem to be picked up by anyone. I havent seen any blog posts on the topic or even articles on Stuff or NZ Herald or anything and I probably wouldn't have known if I hadn't received this email.

I'm in many ways not surprised and I'm sure others probably share my view.

UPDATE: It looks like this has actually been covered in a few articles including the following articles

- Telecom shuts web shopping site on Stuff
- Ferrit to close on Geekzone forums

and a few other posts out there. Thanks for the heads up Mauricio. I missed a lot of news somehow.

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...

Next week we will be having our next user group session for the year where Peter Jones will be talking on SharePoint for ASP Developers.

Also coming up this month is a session on Embedded Development which will also be the inaugural session for the newly launching Embedded user group.

More details on the embedded user group session soon.

Don't forget, if you've got any questions, suggestions or ideas for the user group and session content feel free to post a comment here or contact me directly.

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!

Hey everyone and welcome to 2008, so this is my first post of the year and I've deliberately delayed my first blogging so that I start blogging straight after the 2008RoadTrip here in Christchurch.

As you may know, Darryl, Jeremy and Chris have been doing a tour around the country (the road trip) with Chris and Jeremy presenting on SQL Server 2008 and Windows Server 2008 along with a local speaker covering Visual Studio 2008 and Darryl tagging along.

I think Chris and JB have done a fantastic job presenting despite Chris feeling a little unwell. Our very own Christopher Fairbairn also did a great job on his part. For me it was a bit interesting being an MC for an event that big and talking in front of over 150 or so people. It went ok though I think.

So with Christchurch now done Darryl, Chris and Jeremy still have Dunedin and Invercargill to go, you can still register for these here

The draw for the windows home servers will be done by Jeremy on the 5th of March so stay tuned!

Also as I mentioned yesterday our next user group meeting will be on the 27th of February and the topic for that is ASP.NET MVC presented by John-Daniel from Mindscape in Wellington.

Finally, thanks for all of you who made it to the event  despite the bad weather yesterday. And a special thanks to Chris, JB, and Chris F for a fantastic presentation.

For some more pictures and more on yesterday see Darryl's blog here.

A long time ago I wrote this post about Creativity & Innovation in products & service offerings in IT. Without repeating my other post; I mentioned that I find it interesting to see that big players in one area in the IT industry, such as Google in search and Microsoft in Windows & Office products start going away from their core competencies and offer additional products and services and move away from enhancing their core product (or so it seems to me anyway - not in all cases but in some) for instance, can anyone tell me what the latest major improvement / upgrade Google did to it's search engine??

I personally don't know if anything has changed to improve/change the search experience... Are we there yet? Is this really the best Google can do? Is this really the best Microsoft can do? Is this really the best Yahoo can do? Surely not, I'm sure there's a long way to go.

Anyway, to get to the point of this post: yesterday I came across Tafiti a beta service from Microsoft that offers a different way to search the web powered by the new Live Search. Despite the fact that it might need a little bit of getting used to, it's a cool way of searching IMHO, allows you to also bookmark your searches ...etc. Worth trying out I think.

Live Search itself has been upgraded to a new version (will post about this in more detail soon) I particularly like how they improved the advanced search options of Live Search.