I am retiring my use of Printed on Recycled Electrons, but will keep it online as an archive.

The reason for this is that I am going to focus my blogging on my technical endeavors, and while I have tried using Printed on Recycled Electrons for this, it contains a lot of off-topic personal posts that do not align well with its new direction.

Instead, I am going to continue my technical posts in my new blog, A Clockwork Durian.

posted by Jason at 10:29:59 | 0 comment(s) | 0 trackback(s)

I currently spend my Saturdays studying for my CAPM (Certified Associate in Project Management) and ITIL Certifications. The former is on project-based work which will be useful for development roles, and the latter is for IT support and focuses on IT operations.

CAPM

CAPM is a junior Project Management certification by the Project Management Institute, and tests knowledge of the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK), and does not require actual PM experience.

The gold standard in PM certification, the Project Management Professional, requires documented 4,500 hours of Project Management work which will be subject to audit. Because my colleagues in my previous PM work have left the company, there's no one to validate my experience. I instead opted for CAPM.

For this certification, I primarily use Rita Mulcahy's CAPM Exam Prep Third Edition, which I had to order from Amazon because I couldn't find this book anywhere locally. I also read Information Technology Project Management, Fourth Edition, by Kathy Shwalbe, as a supplement, and the official PM bible, A Guide to the Project Management Book of Knowledge, Third Edition, of course.

I currently am about to start on the Quality Management chapter, having finished the chapters on Introduction, Project Lifecycle, PM Processes, Integration Management, Scope Management and Cost Management.

ITIL

ITIL stands for the IT Infrastructure Library, and the certification I'm going for, ITIL Foundation, covers foundation knowlege on ITIL Service Support and ITIL Service Management processes.

My current role is in technical support, so certified knowledge in ITIL is very important. For this, I use online training materials from Skillsoft.

I currently am on Configuration Management, having finished the Service Desk and Incident Management modules.

.Net

Aside from the 2 above study tracks, I am also continuing my SCSF activities. Having finished up to the Services portion of the lab, I am going to start working on a prototype project, and I chose it to be a Resume Builder software.

I currently am studying the HR-XML standard for resumes, and am currently looking at the Resume schema. I intend to try using a XSD to SQL tool, and then use NHibernate to help out in the data access portion of the code. I will be trying out XSD.EXE from VS 2005 if it can easily generate entity classes from these documents. (I have not yet started getting into the newly released ADO.NET Entity Framework of Microsoft, as I'd like to use .Net 2.0 as the foundation for my piece.)

posted by Jason at 10:13:19 | 0 comment(s) | 0 trackback(s)

It's been a while since I last posted here. I have been busy since attaining my MCPD certification, as I recently got married. I have been posting entries on my other blog (with my wife) over at www.jasonandalpha.com.

I'll be keeping this blog alive for my technical endeavors, the latest of which involve IT Project Management (as I'm reviewing for my CAPM certification) and ITIL. I am still continuing learning frameworks and tools such as the SCSF I have been exploring last year. I'm done with the labs and will be working on a prototype using it pretty soon.

posted by Jason at 10:40:10 | 0 comment(s) | 0 trackback(s)

I finally completed all the exams required for the MCPD-EA certification. This means I can move on to my SCSF exploration, as well as creating the continuous integration setup on my laptop for learning purposes.

It's a great relief.

posted by Jason at 07:33:47 | 0 comment(s) | 0 trackback(s)

I'm down to the last leg of the MCPD-EA journey. After taking all the MCTS exams (3 of them) plus the application development foundation, the final exam to pass is 70-549, Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications Using the Microsoft .Net Framework.

Unlike the other 4 exams, this does not focus on libraries, classes or methods. Rather, it is about best practices in system design, development and deployment. It is aimed at higher level professionals who have a more system-wide view rather than on code.

posted by Jason at 14:37:06 | 0 comment(s) | 0 trackback(s)

The whitepaper mentioned in the previous blog post was helpful in understanding the bigger picture of SCSF. However, when it comes to getting dirty with SCSF, Codeplex' hands on lab seems to provide the best learning exercises. With this, I can go straight to SCSF instead of doing the CAB lab work.

You can get Codeplex' developer hands on lab, which consists of 5 lessons, and then, if you're interested in taking further, go for the architect hands on lab to see how you can modify the tool for your organization's needs.

posted by Jason at 08:51:52 | 0 comment(s) | 0 trackback(s)

I've started the exploration of SCSF today. My trusty guide to this journey is a white paper, titled Designing Applications using CAB and SCSF, written by a software house in Austria.

The document is a good introduction to the software factory. It got me as far as customizing the shell, creating a foundation module, and getting started on the business module...

... and then I got stumped trying to understand all the other things that it didn't explain in detail, in particular, the Composite UI Application Block (CAB).

I thought that diving straight into SCSF will get me to understand quicker in passing. It seems more like understanding CAB is a prerequisite, since most of the customizations and coding are done at the CAB layer.

I'll post more on this soon, as I learn it myself. I need to step back and look at the walkthroughs of CAB now before continuing my first SCSF app.

posted by Jason at 22:22:53 | 0 comment(s) | 0 trackback(s)

Three down, two to go. 70-526 is about Windows-based client development in .Net 2.0. It covers topics such as Windows controls, data access and presentation, printing, asynchronous processing, deployment and user interface techniques. With this exam, I also am now a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: Windows Applications.

posted by Jason at 00:39:15 | 0 comment(s) | 0 trackback(s)

As I have moved on to enterprise technologies, I find myself unable to maintain online assets. If anyone is interested in any of these, to own the domain name and maintain / improve the system, please let me know.

asiarati.com - an online resource for Asia information

cupcakecms.com - an open source content management system built using CakePHP

fusionfiction.com - a comic book project that never saw light.

ictdavao.com - Davao's ICT umbrella organization

philstories.com - Philippine community of storytellers

posted by Jason at 07:07:10 | 0 comment(s) | 0 trackback(s)

I passed exam 70-536 today, earning me the certification of Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: Distributed Applications (as I have passed the other prerequisite exam 70-529 earlier). That leaves me 3 remaining exams towards MCPDEA.

I intend to take it within the month, as this latest exam should have been taken last month, if it weren't for the wedding preparations I had to do here and in Davao.

posted by Jason at 20:20:01 | 0 comment(s) | 0 trackback(s)