Now I own the full deck of the Microsoft certifications and I can sit back and relax (beer is in order . Unfortunately, in the startup world that I operate most of the time, it’s not very recognizable achievement, but it’s nice to put these logos on my presentation slide decks and, especially now, I have a very powerful bragging rights – I have ALL of the Microsoft developers certifications !!!

It was a lengthy path and, I should add, a very confusing one. It wasn’t very obvious what certification is a prerequisite to which one and, I must add, I’ve made a couple of mistakes on the road until I’ve discovered a developer’s certification map by Jorgen Thelin that put everything in order and cleared all the confusions.

If you were wondering why there was a silence on my blog – I was preparing for a battle with the Prometric testing computer And I Won!!! Last week I’ve passed my LAST (for the near future) certification exam: Windows Communication Foundation. This gave me another MCT certification -

And finally enabled my long overdue certification MCPD Enterprise Application Developer.

To those who are looking into passing this certification you may use the following materials that I found very helpful (after the break):

MSDN Webcast: Windows Communication Foundation Top to Bottom

by Michele Leroux Bustamante, writer of the “Learning WCF” book by O’Reilly

Part 01: Overview (Level 100)
Part 02: Contracts (Level 200)
Part 03: Contract Versioning (Level 200)
Part 04: Exceptions and Faults (Level 200)
Part 05: Bindings (Level 200)
Part 06: Hosting (Level 200)
Part 07: Messaging Patterns (Level 200)
Part 08: Instancing Modes (Level 200)
Part 09: Concurrency, Throughput, and Throttling (Level 200)
Part 10: Security Fundamentals (Level 200)
Part 11: Federated Security (Level 200)
Part 12: Reliable Messaging (Level 200)
Part 13: Transactions (Level 200)
Part 14: Message Queuing (Level 200)
Part 15: Extensibility (Level 200)

Mike Taulty’s Screencasts: Windows Communication Foundation

Bindings

Type Serialization

DataContract Serialization

Message Encoding
Sessions
Instancing
Message Patterns
Exceptions
Concurrency
Typed and Untyped Messages
HTTPS Transport Security
Transactions
Message Security
Durable Services with WCF V3.5
Using HTTP, XML and JSON in WCF V3.5
Durable Services with WCF V3.5
Offering Syndicated RSS/ATOM Data from WCF V3.5 Services

and more …

Using Windows CardSpace with WCF by Dominick Baier

MSDN Webcast: RESTful Services with WCF 3.5 SP1

Part 1: Concepts and Introduction (Level 200)
Part 2: Security and Scalability (Level 200)

Great series of articles of fine-tuning WCF performance by Rick Rainey:

WCF Instancing, Concurrency, and Throttling – Part 1
WCF Instancing, Concurrency, and Throttling – Part 2
WCF Instancing, Concurrency, and Throttling – Part 3

and much much more … (hint: Google

Last week got my MCT certification.   Celebration is in order …

This is the phrase that Jeff Sutherland, one of the inventors of the Agile methodology Scrum, has ended his “A Practical Roadmap to a Great Scrum” presentation at Agile Bazaar meet up this Thursday. Couldn’t agree more. In our day and age of the developer’s ignorance and mediocracy we have to find ways to make them to improve. What is the best way to do this?

Developers love challenge. We breathe and eat challenge multiple times every day. So, why not to pose the general improvement as a challenge in front of a team and in front of each and every developer on the team? I, personally, love the idea.

“Non coding architects are fired”, said Jeff. Awesome! Would love to add to that one thing: in my eyes the non-coding architects are as real as Pegasus (as I’ve heard one of the attendees of the recent Norwegian Developers Conference has put on his t-shirt). All this resonates with the interview of Robert C. Martin (Uncle Bob Martin) by Scott Hanselman (Hanselminutes #171) when they’ve talked about developer’s professionalism.

Bob says that our industry is very young and we’re not yet developed our own professional rituals and discipline. He differentiates ritual from discipline by a simple fact that rituals has actions not backed up by science and explanations, but still very effective in what they provide as disciplines. He adds that Agile development, as a discipline, a great driver forward for the industry to mature and for developers to claim “professionalism”. In addition to that, mentoring should be added as a first class citizen into the expertise development at all levels of the organizations in the industry. The same way, as you don’t want to be in a plain flown by a junior pilot, you don’t want your medical record to be managed by a software developed by a junior developer.

Me, personally, is very happy that there are a lot of different factors from the industry itself and from the co-aligned ones that start to push developers and, hopefully, their management into the process improvement. Little by little we’ll change the industry into a mature one that can ensure professionalism at all levels and niches.

Last, but not least, Software Architects should not only code but be the first ones to learn new processes that improve the quality of the development teams and the processes they follow. They should be the ones to implement them and mentor the rest of their teams. They should hone their expertise and their teams as the Samurais hone their swords.

Push yourself and people around you to be better. Challenge everyone and yourself to be better and what you do. Mentor and transfer your knowledge.

I challenge everyone to participate in the community events. Let’s share our expertise and our knowledge.

Our company was mentioned at the press coverage by the TechTarget. Not everything was quoted correctly, but it’s still nice to be mentioned.

Thanks to all the attendees and organizers of the Cloud Camp!

Thanks for all the attendees. You’ve made this event a success! Thanks to all the organizers – without you this would have never happened.

You can find all the pictures are on Flickr and all the the presentations are hosted on the on Architect Factory collateral page (hosted on Azure Cloud).

You can access my presentation directly on the Slide Share:

Note: check out the price analysis article of “True Cost of Hosting” of a big web application deployments on Amazon AWS infrastructure – HotPads

I’m preparing a presentation for the upcoming CodeCamp about the best practices in building enterprise system that can scale to the cloud and stumbled on a real gem – the Dr. Werner Vogels Availability & Consistency presentation during QCon 2007. For those who doesn’t know – Dr. Werner Vogels is VP & CTO at Amazon.com.

In this presentation Dr. Vogels in crystal clear way lays out all the principals that I was a big promoter for the last 10 years. I agree with him on 100,000% and really think that the future is with the BASE scalable systems (and not with ACID) simply because ACID propagates the error to the end user whereas BASE system deals with errors locally. I do agree that in some rare cases ACID is the easier and cheaper way to go, but still sure that even those cases is possible to implement as BASE system.

The Dr. Vogels recipie for success is build system following this menu:

• Autonomy
• Asynchrony
• Controlled concurrency
• Controlled parallelism
• Decentralize
• Decompose into small well-understood building blocks
• Failure tolerant
• Local responsibility
• Recovery Built-in
• Simplicity
• Symmetry

We’ve presented our Amigle startup during  the very first local DemoCamp Boston. The event was organized very well – everything was on schedule and worked as a clock. As a personal preference I’d like to see more vibrant presenters and presentations the next time.

See the full album on Picasa.

Had a pleasure presenting ADO.Net Data Services (Astoria) to the New England VB User Group last Thursday.

Had a lot of fun and there were a lot of great questions.

Feel free to shoot me any questions and you’re welcome to download the PowerPoint slide deck and BeerFest  example source code (yes, we’ve talked about beer tastings .

The slides are based on the Mix’08 and PDC’08 talks.

Decided to give a try to SlideShare and published the presentation there as well.

Post a comment if you’d like to hear a specific topic. What discussions you’d like to participate in?