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You might notice a few odd things on this blog over the next few days.  These are due to a fairly major redesign that’s going on, but rest assured service will return to normal very shortly.

Wow, it’s been a long time since I last posted.  Where have I been I hear you ask, well unfortunately I’ve not been immune to the credit crunch and since October I’ve been hunting for a new job.  Rather predictably this has reduced my exam fund to practically nothing which in turn makes it hard to blog about my exam experiences.

On the plus side I’ve not been idle during this downtime, over the course of the last few months I’ve been getting to grips with WPF, Silverlight and a few of the social networking frameworks so any Facebook or Myspace users out there can expect to see some new distractions coming there way from me.

On the certification side of things I’ve been looking towards my MCPD qualification.  I still have 70-536 to do, but once I’ve got that I’ll have nailed the MCPD (over a considerably longer period of time than any of the other qualifications however).

Also sticking with certifications I’ve finally released the new version of the test engine, this should hopefully give a better insight into the actual exam process as it is more closely modelled on the Prometric experience.  A fuller copy of 70-620 is now available as well as a mini version of 70-640 (it’s only a mini-exam as the actual exam has now been switched in preference for the performance testing based 84-640) which should hopefully give you a flavour of the exam.  I’m still hoping to add more exams as time goes on and I’d welcome any suggestions for which exams you’d like to see.

I’ll try and post a bit more regularly from now on, but if there’s anything you’d especially like me to cover then you only have to ask.

I made a conscious decision when I started this blog to keep my focus tightly on the world of certification.  There were, I reasoned, more than enough blogs filled with inane chatter about everything in the general IT community and often blog that used general news as a filler often found it easier to source material from this ambiguous area rather than their core interests.  However today I’m going to break that resolution (but I certainly don’t plan on making a habit of it).

I am a programmer at heart, and every now and then a product will come along who’s concept or implementation is so finely crafted it will leave me temporarily speechless.  In the last two days I have seen two such projects, and boy am I impressed.  The first is already getting a good buzz, but I see this only set to increase in the future, and that is Google Wave.  In essence Wave is simply another communications platform (in fact its not even that, as wave just provides an extension to the existing XMPP platform).  Wave acts as a near real-time threaded XML transport (that is threaded in the conversation sense, not in the multi-processing sense), as XML is simply a description language the clever bit happens with at the client used to consume the data, in short Wave allows to send, receive and collaborate on anything you can describe in an XML document.  The initial offering shows an e-mail/social network/bulletin board style environment used for information exchange, however to show case the power of wave there have already been extensions that allow you to play chess and sudoku across a wave (chess moves work quite well as XML and game logic can be enforced at the client).  Waves are also timeline aware and allow you to playback the formation of a wave, a feature that allows late joinee’s to a conversation to quickly pick up on how things have progressed.  Furthermore the wave can be forked off at various points, allowing you to prune the wavelet tree back to the critical points.  On top of this Wave allows robots (or automated agents) to take part in waves with an equal level of ownership to real life clients.  This allows some impressive mid-conversation re-interpretation.  One example showed a robot that was able to translate between languages in real time and with a good view towards context.  Another demonstrated possibly the most advanced spell checker I’ve ever seen which interpreted context based on a database built from Google’s own search data.

So far a lot of the buzz surrounding Wave has been about it being a Facebook or msn messenger killer, however I really don’t think this is the case.  Wave provides the ability to write transports to most other communications platforms, twitter and Orkut were both shown in the initial presentation and there was a lot of talk about e-mail transports in there as well.  If anything I can see Wave replacing a section of traditional e-mail messages, however I think for the most part it will be a complimentary technology, one that supports cross media communication in a way that has never before been possible.  This level of adaptability combined with Google’s commitment to open source and federation of Wave servers leave me with high hopes for this technology.

The next technology I’m getting really excited about is Project Natal from Microsoft.  While its currently being shown as a games controller I think this could have some real potential to affect the way in which we expect to interact with our computers in the future.  Natal is a 3D camera with face and voice recognition.  Natal is shown to be able to do full body motion capture without the need for the traditional “ping-pong ball suit”.  This leaves users with a very natural method of interacting with their systems.  It’s clear in the video that a lot of the vocal input is disregarded and that the majority of it seems be based on trigger keywords.  I also wouldn’t be entirely surprised to find a good part of the interaction had been scripted specifically for this video.  However if real life performance is even a fraction of what is shown, we could be in for a real treat.

Anyway as promised this was something of a one off.  I’ll be back to more traditional posts from now, however I can really see these being two technologies to keep an eye on in the future… Enjoy.

Microsoft have announced that the move to digital certificates is complete.  New certifications will have the option to download digital certificates or pay a fee to receive the traditional paper cert.  This is being mooted as a  green initiative however news from the blog did also suggest that there were cost cutting concerns as well.

There’s an interesting post on Born to Learn about the new .NET 4.0 developer exams.  It looks as though the Windows Developer track is going to merge the Windows Forms and WPF tracks into a single exam also Silverlight is being rolled into the Web Developer track.  There’s also some interesting points raised about where the Enterprise Developer certification is headed in these new versions.  If you’re a developer or thinking about heading down that certification route pop over and add your views here.