I’ve recently passed the MCP exam 70-536: TS: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Application Development Foundation. My overall experience has been very positive. Although there are a few not so relevant topics I think that most of them are a must-know if you’re a .NET developer. I found the exam quite easy with only a few really nitpicking questions. Maybe I was just lucky but it was a pleasant surprise for me.

I used the Microsoft Self-Paced Training Kit as the study guide. In spite of the mistakes it contains (see errata) I still find it a useful overview of the topics covered by the exam. I even think of it as a great overview of .NET framework for every developer even if he’s not considering taking the exam. On the other hand it really shouldn’t be your only resource, more of a starting point to direct you to the topics you realize you don’t know enough about. MSDN or a more specialized book can help you from there on.

If you’re interested, I’m selling my own copy of the book at a reduced price. It is in mint condition, I’ve even left the 15% off voucher unused. On a side note: here you can always see the list of items I am selling. The link is listed among my other sites in the left column of this page.

Ever since I attended a lecture on test driven development I’ve been trying to find a way to use its essential part – unit testing – in real development environment. I realized this isn’t completely trivial after assigning a developer to write ad hoc unit tests for the class library of a recent project and failing at it completely because the tests turned out to make sure the method functionality wouldn’t change instead of making sure the functionality is actually correct.

Since a new project is coming up and we really need more security when changing the code in its later phases I decided to dedicate some more time to exploring and deriving the concepts of using unit testing in a not really development driven project. Well, I happened to stumble upon Pragmatic Unit Testing in C# with NUnit, a book which turned out to be a perfect answer to my questions. All that’s left now is to make the developers read the book and grasp its concepts before starting their work on the project.

In a few months you’ll probably be able to read here how it turned out. In the meantime I recommend the book to everyone who wants to start with unit testing but just doesn’t know how to do it.

When I started to work on my Master’s thesis I first had to find a good source of articles from science magazines and journals and proceedings from conferences related to my research field. Since I didn’t want to spend most of the time in the faculty library which would be difficult anyhow due to strange hours I used to work on my thesis, I was looking for an online source.

The obvious choice was Google Scholar but it soon turned out that although its searching capabilities are great, it still doesn’t give access to the full text of the articles. After I realized that there’s no way to get enough material for free I decided to join the ACM (Association for Computing Machinery) as a professional member and go for the additional ACM Digital Library subscription. This gave me access most of the articles they ever published which was almost everything I needed.

At the end of the month it’ll be a year since I’ve done this and it was time to renew my membership. My first thought was to just let it go since I’ve already finished the thesis in the meantime. But I remembered having read in one of their newsletters that their professional members were given access to a part of the Safari Bookshelf so I decided to take a look at what exactly they offered. It turned out that every ACM member has access to their Professional Development Centre which includes 500 online books from the Safari Enterprise Library, 395 online books from Books24x7 and over 1000 online courses from ThomsonNETg. A more detailed look revealed that there’s a lot in there that would be of interest to me.

Therefore I’ve just renewed my subscription for another year, this time without the ACM Digital Library access because I certainly won’t need it unless I decided to write a Ph. D. thesis which surely won’t happen within the next 12 months. It’s well worth it even if you’re only about to read a selection of the books but there are other membership benefits as well.

One more thing: if you come from Slovenia or any other "economically developing country", don’t forget to take advantage of the discounts. You could save even more.