There and Back Again : Learning Resources

SharePoint Goodness

hdierking — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 23:57:06 GMT

SharePoint is one of those technologies for me that is large enough in scope and ambition that I am simultaneously in awe of it and confused by it. To elaborate on the confusing aspect, SharePoint feels like it has multiple masters - more specifically, it's hard to know who should be paying attention to it. Is it a system admin type of product? Is it a developer platform? Is it a collaboration portal for use by regular users. The answer, which speaks both to the power and the confusion, is "absolutely yes".

I personally buy into the vision of SharePoint as a web application platform. I don't think we're there yet, but it makes a lot of sense to me that we'll get there. That said, it's still really confusing as a developer to know where to get started with SharePoint (although Ted has done a fantastic job at trying to help dense folks like myself). I was recently forwarded an email, however, with some great resources for getting started as a developer. First, there's the Web site http://www.microsoft.com/click/SharePointDeveloper/ - there are a lot of great jumping off points here. There's also a great set of getting started Webcasts. For more information on that, check out Paul's post.

Check it out.

My Last Certification Post... (aka - Introducing Gerry)

hdierking — Sat, 20 Oct 2007 04:05:13 GMT

Well, that might be a little overly-dramatic, but all you folks that have been following this blog for certification news should definitely pay attention. As you may or may not know (if you didn't know, um...surprise?), I left Microsoft Learning this past summer to take the Editor-in-Chief job at MSDN Magazine. I also said that I would point you to my replacement's blog when I actually had a replacement.

Well, I now have a replacement, so it gives me great pleasure to introduce to you Gerry O'Brien. Please check out his blog for lots of certification goodness (and since he's also a developer at heart, I'm sure he'll also provide lots of other random geeky goodness).

OBA - Are We There Yet?

hdierking — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 08:40:04 GMT

I am a beliver in the power of Office as the pre-eminant smart client for the majority of LOB applicaitons. However, I also think that we're still a little ways off from realizing my belief - not because of some entrenched NIH complex held to by consultants (though there is some of that (NOTE: because I was a consultant for at least half of my career, I take the liberty of making such broad generalizations in good fun <g>)). - but because in general, both the tooling and the guidance for building business apps based on Office as a platform has been somewhere between sketchy and non-existant.

Office 2007 brought us closer with the adoption of the OpenXML document formats - and with the forthcoming VSTO enhancements, like click once support for customizations, we take another step. Also, today I stumbled upon this piece of guidance for developers - I'm not sure that it's necessarily guidance, but it certainly at least lays out the different options (and it just looks cool).

So while we're not yet past having to deal with COM and all of its associated headaches, we can at least have a pretty WPF applet to play with.

Community Based Development - Let's Talk

hdierking — Tue, 05 Jun 2007 22:28:25 GMT

One thing that's been a major point of frustration for me over the last year is a conversation that goes something like this.

[Me] - "We should totally do exams around XYZ and ABC"
[Management] - "We only have budget for N developer exams this year. See if the product group has money."
[Product Group] - "We totally want to help in every way possible, but we don't have any budget either."

So what happens in cases like this? It's pretty simple really - an exam does not get built. I want to fix this problem by turning the way in which we develop exams completely upside down and I want your thoughts.

First, one piece of background information. It is REALLY expensive to create an exam. The reason behind the expense has to do with the fact that for every part of the process we bring in individuals who are subject matter experts across the entire exam content domain - and these sorts of individuals don't come cheap. My contention is that for question development, anybody is capable of writing a good question for a specific objective, and we should stop limiting ourselves to only the folks who are experts across all the objectives.

So what do I want to do? Here are the high-level thoughts...

Objective domain development via Wiki. As you probably know, the functional outline to which we write exam questions is called the objective domain. I would like to get more eyes (and hands) on this document than those of the 5-7 folks that we currently fly to Redmond since the purpose of the document is to outline the relevant skills required to support an assertion of competency in a technology. In my mind, editing and validation by more people equals greater relevancy for the exam/certification.
Community-based question development. Currently, we hire 5-7 individuals and require them to write up to 30 questions each depending on the size of the item pool. There are a few really bad potential ramifications here.

Authors must be subject matter experts across the entire domain - this comes at a premium.
Authors must write a lot of questions each - this can lead to author burnout.
Authors must potentially write questions on topics that they are not all that passionate about.
The total number of items is all we get for an exam. If somebody comes out with a dump, the exam is exposed without much recourse (other than starting the whole process over again). Additionally, any questions that we kill (for whatever reason) are simply lost - there's no new questions to fill the spot - the result is simply a smaller question pool.

I want to create an infrastructure whereby anybody who is passionate about an objective is able to submit a question. Additionally, if the question is accepted into the pool, I want the author given credit on the Microsoft publication notes (prep guide, etc...). There are a TON of detail to work out here, but again, these are the high level notes.

So is this just another scheme to cut costs internally? Sure - there's a cost component. However, there are also a lot of other components that I think outweigh the simple element of cost.

More coverage of technology. Under the current development model, we simply don't have the ability to scale. Community based development pretty significantly changes the rules of the game and allows us much greater flexibility.
Better coverage. I'm going to stick my neck out a bit here and suggest that 50 people writing 1 question each will yield a better question pool than 1 person writing 50 questions.
Continuous re-seeding. One of the biggest problems in terms of cheating is that the brain dump people know that once the question pool is built, those are the only questions that they need to steal. Under a community-driven model, new questions are continuously accepted into the question pool, even after the exam has been released. In my mind, this really changes the game from "Microsoft vs. the brain dump people" to "Community vs. the brain dump people".

In the end, it's a matter of tradeoffs. If we continue along our current model, then we're going to assume that our costs are essentially fixed. This really only gives us 2 areas where we can make tradeoffs: coverage and quality. Practically, we will not sacrifice quality. Therefore, the only axis left is coverage. The mindset behind community based development in terms of cost is not to reduce MSL's total cost of doing business - it's to reduce the cost of developing an exam so that we can build more exams. It's an effort to do more with what we have - to do what we do better.

So what do I want from you? Your thoughts, obviously!

Are you, the community of certified Microsoft developers, engaged enough to participate in this kind of initiative?
What are your initial reactions/thoughts to the entire idea?
Where do envision the biggest pain points to be in executing this kind of vision?
What am I missing - what might I not have considered?

I look forward to hearing from you.

Training Kits Released for Exams 70-547 and 70-548

hdierking — Tue, 13 Feb 2007 01:40:20 GMT

The following training kits are now available for the professional level exams in Windows and Web development. Also, expect to see a training kit bundle released at the end of this month that covers all 3 exams required to obtain the MCPD : Web certification. More information can be found here.