I passed a Microsoft Certification Test!

-

I passed the first test of 3 for my Microsoft MCAD Certification! I passed the test called "Developing Windows Based Applications with Microsoft Visual Basic.NET and Microsoft Visual Studio"

yippeee!yahooooo!

It has been a longtime goal of mine to get the Microsoft Certification for Programmers, so it is a great personal victory for me to have passed the first test. I didn't actually think that I would pass it, I was taking it to see how hard the test was and how hard I would have to study to pass it because I got a take-it-again-for-free coupon. :) But I did in fact pass it on my first try. I scored a 775, while the minimum score to pass is a 700, so I passed by a margin of 3 questions on a 38 question test. I was certainly happy coming out of the test.


Now I think I will stop having those nagging nightmares where I'm in school again and can't find my class. Something that didn't bother me conciously, but something - perhaps in retrospect humerously - that bugged me subconsiously. So it's a great personal victory for me. In addition to a great professional affirmation of my skillsets, it's proof to myself that I haven't lost my academic touch.

Gotta go celebrate!

-Joseph

(added 3/19/2005) My father-in-law, Stayner Lewis, asked a good question about the certification: "what kind of certifiation is this." So.. let me put this certification in perspective. Most professional professions have their industry accepted degrees/lisences/certifications/advanced degrees. Lawyers have the bar, Actualary accountains have their standard set of tests, CPAs have their test/certifications. Business people can get an MBA. Well programmers are a interesting animal. There isn't really a common advanced degree or an industry wide certification for programmers. Maybe because programming is relatively new compared to law, medicine, tax, and insurance. Also, the skill that need to be demonstrated are technology specifc: Sun's Java Language Microsoft's .NET language, Cisco's various languages, etc. So what can a programmer do to further his education and demostrate compentency in programming skills? This is where Professional Programming Certifications come into play. Each company produces its own set of tests, and Microsoft's program is called MCP, Microsoft Certified Professional.

When I finish the "MCAD" certification that I'm working on, the acronym will go next to my name on my business cards and email signatures etc: "Joseph Fluckiger, MCAD". Has a nice ring to it doesn't it? anyway, hope that helps clarify a bit.

-Joseph

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

RAM Disks do not speed up Visual Studio

-
  The limiting factor for Visual Studio is disk IO. I got a tip to speed up Visual Studio from Channel 9 by creating a RAM disk which sounded like a great idea. However, when I ran a thorough set of tests, I found that the performance difference between the Ram disk and the hard disk were not appreciably different. This was a big surprise since RAM is 240,000 times faster than disk (see my previous blog post). But the reason is because Visual Studio and Vista do a lot of caching. So compile times for the same project in RAM disk and on hard disk were pretty similar. I also tested the time it took to search the entire solution for a word, and times to open a solution. There was no discernable difference!   If you still want to try it out and create your own RAM disk, you can download a simple RAMDISK.EXE utility to create a RAM disk in just a few minutes. What is a RAM Disk ?   Ramdisk is a virtual drive created in RAM.   Performance Analysis Creating files was an average
Read more

How to Create and Run Tableau Bridge on Linux Containers

-
Tableau Bridge is now availble on Linux Containers. Yay! Now what does this mean and how do I build and run Linux Containers? We will discuss the advantages of running Bridge on Linux Containers the steps to build them, and finally, we will provide some automation script ideas for monitoring and scaling Linux Bridge agents. Tableau Bridge Today Until recently, Tableau Bridge was only available as a Windows application running on a Windows VM. It supported only one bridge agent per Virtual or Physical Machine. Advantages of Bridge in Containers Better Hardware Utilization: Linux containers are more efficient than Windows VMs, requiring only about 1/50th of the disk space. Ability to Spin Up Multiple Bridge Agents: With Linux Containers, it becomes easier to spin up multiple bridge agents on a single machine, improving scalability and resource utilization. Infrastructure Automation: Linux Containers enable easier automation of provisioning bridge agents and upgrading Tableau Bridge, the
Read more

Outlook tip: Turn off Email Contact Pictures

-
Image
  Many people find the photos in the window border to be a little distracting. It is easy to turn them off by adding a registry key.  Follow these simple steps: 1) Save the text below between the lines into a text file and rename the file “dontShowContactPicture.reg”. ------ Windows Registry Editor Version 5.00 [HKEY_CURRENT_USER\Software\Microsoft\Office\14.0\Outlook\Options\Mail] "ShowContactPicture"=dword:00000000 ------ 2) Double click the file and you will be prompted: 3) Restart Outlook. 4) See the result: Before: After: 5) To undo this change and turn pictures back on, simply edit the file and change “dword:00000000” to “dword:00000001”   More information can be found in this related article on stackoverflow.com
Read more