I recently stumbled across an interesting Microsoft certifications page that includes the number of people worldwide who have each of the various certifications.  It’s pretty interesting.  At last update, there are just over 13,000 MCT’s worldwide, and only about 4,000 MCPD: Enterprise Application Developers worldwide!  I was really surprised at how low the numbers are for the three flavors of MCPD after two years of availability.

This gives me a great opportunity to put some graphics on this blog for a change! 

Since I have been so behind on my blog this year, I’m writing this in November but I passed the 70-235 exam in June (!).  Passing is 700 with 50 questions total.  I was pleased to walk away with an 842, despite the diabolical BAM questions they always throw in.

I think the exam was quite good as certification exams go.  It covered many aspects of the product and in order to pass you will have to spend hands-on time with the product.  There was quite a bit of BAM and BRE, some poorly written questions, but pretty much as expected overall.  There was a question on BRE FactRetrievers that I wasn’t expecting, but otherwise, no code-focused questions.

The question types are a lot of “choose X of Y”, some straight choose-one multiple choice and some “choose the necessary steps from a list and put them in the right order.”

If you’re a current or aspiring BizTalk developer and want to be part of a group who really knows and loves BizTalk, and you’re in the Twin Cities area, please contact me.  We are always looking for people who have a passion for BizTalk!

One of those exciting new products is Microsoft BizTalk Server 2006 R2, which features Microsoft’s new RFID platform, extensive support for EDI and all-new native WCF adapters (my favorite!).  I had the pleasure of presenting at the Minneapolis/St. Paul-area BizTalk Server 2006 R2 Launch event on October 9th.  My session was entitled “BizTalk Server 2006 R2: A Core Component of a Service-Oriented Architecture” and was very well-attended.  Thank you to everyone who listened in!  We even had Jon Flanders from Pluralsight and Michael Woods from the BizTalk product group on hand, and Michael introduced my sessions with an overview of Microsoft’s vision of SOA.

Tonight, November 15th, I’m presenting a session with my co-worker Randall entitled “Message Queuing with BizTalk 2006 R2: MSMQ, IBM WebSphere MQ and Ordered Delivery” for the Twin Cities BizTalk User Group.  I’m going to talk about queuing and the pros and cons, go through some MQ configuration issues and demo the MSMQ and WebSphere MQ adapters for BizTalk.  Randall is going to show some code as part of a solution for ordered delivery using MSMQ.  We hope to see you there!

Thanks to everyone who attended my session on working with large messages in BizTalk and ASP.NET Web services!  The session was well attended and, not surprisingly, a lot of people are having these issues.  As soon as I get approval from Microsoft, I’ll get a post together with the PowerPoint slides and the pipeline component code.

Overall, the conference was worthwhile, but I would have preferred much more detail in the sessions and greater presence from the MS product developers.  Hopefully that will be improved for next year.  No real news from the conference other than the limited availability to partners of an ESB guidance package for BizTalk.

Thanks for reading and please stay tuned for the session materials.

The conference features four tracks, three technical and one business:

• Service Oriented Architecture (incl. BizTalk 2006, WCF, WF, HIS and more)
• Connected Systems Technology and Products (.NET 3.0 and BizTalk 2006)
• Business Process Management (Office System 2007 and BizTalk 2006 R2)
• Business Value (Why care and what are the opportunities)

The agenda and sessions are still being finalized, so keep checking the conference website for updates.

I’m pleased to announce that I will be presenting the following session in the SOA track, so I hope to see you there!

Effective Techniques for Working with Large Messages in a Service-Oriented Architecture

In a Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA), small messages are easy to work with and don’t create extra challenges of their own, but various issues arise when the message size grows to megabytes in size. This session will identify the issues you should consider and then explore specific techniques that you can use to work effectively with large messages in ASP.NET 2.0 Web services and BizTalk Server 2006.

Fresh hands-on experience definitely helps with this test, as well as a lot of facts and useless knowledge like the command-line parameters to the management tools.  Microsoft’s expert test writers seem to believe that one will not have access to the product documentation to simply LOOK UP command-line parameters!

Having not laid a hand on BizTalk (2004) for at least three months, and having procrastinated studying again, I wasn’t looking forward to test day, but I passed and it’s done, so it was worth the trouble.

So how did I prepare (or not, in this case)?  I read the first 300 pages of BizTalk 2004 Unleashed in the three evenings prior as a refresher.  Beyond that I relied on my brief experience of 6-8 weeks earlier this year developing with BizTalk messaging and orchestrations, and I have done many BizTalk installs with both 2004 and 2006, not to mention debugging other peoples’ BizTalk solutions.

The test manages to hit almost every aspect of BizTalk, including Messaging, Orchestrations, HWS, BAM, BAS, installation and management.  That’s why the hands-on experience is so important.

A couple of weeks back, I took the 70-536 exam and walked away with a score of 895.  Disappointing (yes, all things are relative) because I got 100% on the sections that should have been the hardest for me and missed questions on “easier” sections.  However, a lot always depends on how they phrase the questions and how much you read into them.  This was no better than any of the past MS exams in that regard.

I’m now certified as an MCTS: .NET Framework 2.0 Distributed Applications.  Could they make these titles any longer?  My end goal is MCPD, which requires three more exams (argh).

The majority of the 45-question, 2-hr max test was code questions where you have four or five code samples from which to choose.  There were also “choose and order” questions where you have 6-7 actions and you have to pick just the ones you need and put them in the right order.

None of the exam prep books were available when I prepared for this test, and the scope of this exam is so large that I resorted to simply reading the MSDN class library documentation.  I went through each class in the exam prep list, looked it up and read the docs.  Yes, it was every bit as painful as it sounds.  I used the MeasureUp practice test after I had read through everything.

The official MS Press prep book is finally available, with another non-Microsoft book supposedly coming soon.  Here’s the exam prep guide.

I suppose some background is in order:

After leaving behind years of BASIC in the Apple II world, I made the jump to PCs in 1990 and picked up the C language in MS-DOS. That led to C++ in MS-DOS and a few years later to Visual C++ for Windows. Over the following years I worked with MFC, ATL, COM, COM+/MTS and more in all kinds of cool, high-performance GUI and service apps. During the same time period, I spent countless hours in systems engineering for my employers’ IT departments, implementing and maintaining everything from Raptor firewalls to Exchange installations.

In January 2002, the development side of my world changed as I switched to .NET 1.0 working with Microsoft Business Solutions. Soon after, in June 2002, I co-wrote the book “VB.NET Solutions Toolkit”, published by Wrox Press. I still often miss C++, but 95% of my development work since 2002 has been in .NET, both C# and VB.NET.

I’ve resisted the blog craze for a long time, but I just need an outlet for all of my “Did you know/remember XYZ?” thoughts. There is SO much to know as a Microsoft developer these days, that no one can keep even 20% of it in memory at once. I think it’s helpful to have a place to go not only for new knowledge, but also for reminders of things that you might have forgotten.

We’ll see where this goes. Thanks for reading.