It's a Tuesday, but feels like a Friday!

This evening I went running with the Mid Michigan Track Club. We met at Hawk Island park. What a great evening, and the park is especially beautiful. I really enjoyed running with these folks, and it was a good change of pace for me. I have been way too geeked out recently with .Net exams, and work-work and technology. After that, Minal and I met up with the Raad's, owners of Woody's Oasis. We went to dinner at Sindu's. The food, as usual was outstanding. They are such wonderful people. All in all, a real fun evening.

West Michigan Day of .Net was a great success

This past week was incredibly busy for me. My project at work is in a critical stage and takes a lot of my time. Then, I went to my Optometrist who gave me the good news / bad news. Bad news - my vision has slipped a little. Good news is that it is not too bad. Good enough to drive, but just bad enough to cause some annoyance since I cannot see crisply, or recognize people's faces until they get up close. So if you guys don't see me waving back at you, I'm not being rude - I just cannot see you. (That's my story and I am sticking to it!). Anyway, the annoying part is after all these years, just when HDTV is upon us and I bought a beautiful Samsung LCD panel, now my vision slips. Grr!

I attended the West Michigan day of .Net this past Saturday at Davenport by the Grand Rapids airport. I was very impressed with the speakers. It was a great opportunity to catch up with technologies. I spent ALL of Sunday (I mean 10am to past midnight!) reading up on all the things the speakers talked about, and gave references, and other things I was not familiar with. It looks like this year there is a lot of emphasis on TDD, testing tools, continuous integration. Also WCF and WPF are big. There were talks on new languages F#, Boo/DSL, and also a mention of Ruby. I'm gonna read up on them sometime in the future, especially F#.

I am named the director of education for GLUGnet

The president of the Greater Lansing .Net User Group, Joe Kunk asked me to be the "Certification Director", and launch and lead the .Net study group. I suggested that Education director would be a better sounding title. He got OK from the board, so here I am, on the GLUGnet board as the Education Director. One of my first steps is to launch the study group for the next exam 70-528(MCTS .Net Web development). I have sent the message out to the community. We will be meeting Wednesdays 6pm-8pm at the Gone Wired Cafe in Lansing starting May 21st.

I am an MCP now! Passed the .Net Framework test!

I am glad to announce that I cleared this exam last week. The study group really helped me - I don't think I could have done without it. The subject matter for the 70-536 is vast, and having the study group automatically puts you on a schedule of completing one chapter a week. Also getting together and discussing the chapter helps clarify the content. Most of all, it keeps you inspired to keep on going. Call it the "weight watchers of .Net".

The book unfortunately was choke full of errors and had missing information. That made preparing for the test all the more difficult. I studied my butt off, because I wasn't sure on the format of the exam and how hard the questions would be. Looks like all my studying paid off as I scored on 931, well above the 700 passing grade. I'm still trying to figure out how to reward myself - I deserve it this time!