Arno Beljaars

Essentials of RUP

This week I took a two-day class in "Essentials of RUP" at the LogicaCMG academy. The course was given by Peter van de Heijde from IBM  Peter gave a theoretical introduction and showed us the RUP-database. LogicaCMG collegeas can download this tool from the intranet.

I was surpised that very few attendees worked in their every day practice with some kind of development methodology (most only knew something about DSDM or process management ideas from Prince2)  The projects in our Microsoft competence might be relatively small, but even this kind of projects can profit from the best-practices tought by RUP. You can for example use the templates, guidelines and checklists. The course definitely made us more aware of this.

MCAD

Last week I passed for my third (and final) exam for the MCAD.Net (VS 2003) certification. I already had a couple of years of experience with developing in .Net, but still learned quite a lot by studying for the exams. What I did for passing:

- read the Microsoft Press books and did some of the labs. The labs are especially valuable when you have no experience. I found the books were easy to read, but was not impressed by the content. They were good for an Introduction, but just reading the books is not enough when you want to take the exams.
- read parts of books written by Amit Kalami (Que Press). Those books are very well written and more comprehensive than the Microsoft books.
- did some tests with Tanscender. Different questions than on the exams, but it gives you an idea of the areas you're lacking.
and finally:
- testking, testking, testking... Some say it's cheating, I just think it helped me a lot.

Lately, I travel by train almost every day. During the trips I fight boredom by reading e-books on my PDA. The RepliGo software was very handy for this.

On to the MCSD and 2005 upgrades...