70-529: Distributed Application Development

I need to prepare for an exam next week, and after my most recent exam experience I am going to study a little bit harder. The exam is Distributed Application Development and is the second of three I am scheduled to take.

Over the coming days I will use my blog to record any notes that I think are worth making about preparation for this exam. The previous exam I took was quite tough (no I won’t tell you in which areas) mostly because they would given you several API usage scenarios and you have to pick which one is wrong.

Duplicated blog post?

Looks like someone “reused” my blog post! The way I found out was that I did a Technorati search for all blog posts that link to my blog, it came up with this, and I didn’t notice my blog linked from the page so I brought up the source for the page and there was an empty anchor tag there.

Strange stuff! Now – if you look at the subtitle of the blog and compare it to mine, its even stranger!

Update: Joseph (in the comments) found three other instances of plagarized work on the blog in question.

Congratulations to Rocky and Clarke!

Congratulations to Rocky and Clarke on being awarded as MVPs!

Team Foundation Server as a Code Freezer

I’ve been using Project Distributor for a while to store lumps of code that I want to share with people in the outside world, and its been a great site for that. But what about those proprietary pieces of code that you want to store for other developers on your team?

One simple process template that could be put together for TFS is a Code Freezer which basically has one work item type – the “Release Note”. Basically it would give you a central location to put all those simple little console applications and class libraries that do stuff which aren’t really a product, but are too good to throw away.

Analogies and Cultural Awareness

I came across this little story on Darren’s blog where he talks about an analogy he tried to use in his web parts book and how it was scratched because the US audience wouldn’t know what it meant.

One of the things that I love about the whole writing process (not that I am writing a book or anything) is that you have the opportunity to expand someones horizons or increase their cultural awareness. In Darren’s case this would have been a great opportunity to pop in a side bar explaining the simple rules of the pass the parcel game.

Who knows – some geek reading it might just be planning a birthday party for their kid and try it out!

Now with RDOS!

A few weeks ago my blog was getting inundated with spam. Until then it had been at a manageable level with only two or so comments every couple of days. However when I was on holidays I actually had a backlog of several hundred comments and it took me a good hour and half to work through cleaning them up.

The problem you see is that I didn’t have a good way of deleting them, the .Text interface is pretty slow and the posts were all over the place. After cleaning them up I downloaded and installed RDOS into the site. Since then I have only had two spam messages – both of them using alternate spellings specifically to fool the filter.

Overall I am pretty happy with the results.