Catching up....
After a fairly intense period of full on study I finally sat the MCPD Windows Developer upgrade exam (70-552) and was pretty shocked to see that I failed. wtf? can I say wtf on the Internet? of course I can because I failed the exam, wtf? To be honest I don't like the new format they have introduced in the upgrade exams.
Basically you sit three one hour exams (70-526, 70-536, and 70-548), which in itself is fine but if you finish two exams in 30 minutes, then the hour isn't transferred into the last exam, which is a bit unfair. Basically I passed the two code based TS exams (70-526, and 70-536) taking about 30 minutes for each and messed up on the (70-548) questions to do with debugging performance and troubleshooting network problems, which you really need experience of, not something you can read in a book, if infact you can find a book on it. What was so annoying was the outstanding hour wasn't transferred and with 30 questions in 1 hour, 2 minutes a question, thats a bit harsh Microsoft.
So anyway I have been neglecting my blog and to a greater extent DotNetSlackers and everyone here, and for that I appologise. I have so much to write about as well. Lots of nice little juicy code snippets but just not getting around to posting them for some reason. Need to start posting from work more I think and recent changes in my position might make that more of a possibility. I'll make it happen.
Need to write an article as well, I haven't written one this year and that's rubbish. Think I'll write an article on the internals of the DES and 3DES encryption algorthims, which is a subject I've been reading up on, not DES specifically just crytography and security in general. I believe that, with the way the industry is going, the two most important subjects for a developer to know is security and threading.
But I do need to contribute more!!