April 2004 - Posts

• Square Man Hole Covers

  I'm out of town again this week in the lovely city of Cincinatti.  The last time I was here I managed to watch exactly 19 episodes of Law & Order.  And two episodes of Law & Order: SVU.  Because that is probably not good for the mental health, I decided to stop by the book store and grab some reading materials.  My first thought was that I'd grab the Test Driven Development and Object Thinking book.  Unfortunately, my local bookstore is ran by clowns.  When it comes to computer books, you run into two barriers.  Barrier #1: Lack of new materials.  It seems this particular book store has been pretty lazy about getting the latest and greatest computer books in stock (and based on the fact that they still have a book on the .NET Building Blocks on the shelves, I'm not surprised).  Barrier #2 is a doosey.  They have a seemingly random approach to putting books on the shelves unless it is clear where they belong.  You know that the books with Visual Basic on the cover will be in the VB section, C# books will be in the C# (err, I should say C++ for this book store).  But where would Object Thinking go?  It could go ANYWHERE based on their logic.  So I need to check all sixteen shelves of books.  I found books on programing MFC next to “Intro to Windows XP.”  I found a book GDI+ next to photoshop books.  The ADO.NET books are found, naturally, with the Oracle books.  As for books like Essential .NET?  They are next to the Cisco and TCP/IP books (the networking section).  I found UML books in the XML section.  And my favorite, in between a book on CSS and another book on picking colors for websites was a book on WSE.  Does anyone else going into a bookstore, and think about breaking in at night and reorginizing their shelves?  Drives me crazy. But I'm not here to talk about bookstores.  I want to talk about “How Would You Move Mount Fuji.”  One of the more famous questions in the book is "why are manhole covers round?"  The author mentions that New York City has square manhole covers, so I got online this morning and looked up square manhole covers.  Among the "answers" to the popular question I found a cool site called Forgotten NY, which among other things has pictures of all kinds of manhole covers that are found in NY (including the square ones).  I love the “hidden” features of cities.  For example, Cincinatti has an almost complete subway system going unused.  Posted Apr 26 2004, 11:28 AM by Phil Scott with 2 comment(s)

• The Dreaded 70-320 / 70-310 Exam

  I promised a while back in my post about the 25% of MCSD / MCAD related tests post to write up some more stuff, and I've managed to not write a single thing.  The moral of the story, as usual, is I'm not to be trusted.  To correct that, without further ado, a little help on the dreaded 70-320 / 70-310 exam.  For those not familiar with the exam numbers, this is the “Developing XML Web Services and Server Components with insert favorite language here.” exam.  And it's a doosy.  I'd be willing to bet there are quite a few MCAD candidates out there who only need to take this exam, but have been scared off by the exam matrix.  I mean, they list FOUR courses that you need to take to be ready for this exam, and even then that doesn't even get into remoting!  But it isn't that bad.  I too was scared to take it, but once I registered myself for the test, and got down to business I was glad to pass it.  Here is what I think are most people's top concerns about this exam, and hopefully I'll point you towards some help to get over these humps. Create and manipulate a Windows service Create and consume a serviced component. Create and consume a .NET Remoting object. Create and use SOAP extensions Use SOAP extensions for debugging. Publish XML Web service definitions in the UDDI. Things not commonly worried about, but should be (expect LOTS of questions) Configure and use trace listeners and trace switches Configure client computers and servers to use a Windows service, a serviced component, a .NET Remoting object, and an XML Web service. Implement versioning Plan, configure, and deploy side-by-side deployments and applications. Everyone when they first take one of these Microsoft developer exams are amazed at how many questions relating to debugging and deployment there actually are on the exam.  So be prepared. First of all, bookmark Tim's Exam Links.  Do it now.  What Tim has done is gone through the “skills being tested” section of the exam matrix and linked to help.  This is the way I've always prepared for exams, and this made it a piece of cake to ramp up on things that I don't do on a day to day basis.  Good times.  You could pass using this resource alone.  But a lot of people are book people.  One book that some people have told me that has been helpful is Microsoft .NET Distributed Applications: Integrating XML Web Services and .NET Remoting.  This book covers Component Services, .NET Remoting and XML Web Services and has three case studies to play around with.  Also has some decent chapters on threading and the such.  Not perfect or very in depth, but any book covering so many technologies would be hard pressed to have complete coverage of all the topics. Other books to check out to take your skills to the next level would be (of course) Ingo's Advanced .NET Remoting book, Juval Löwy's COM and .NET Component Services, and Yasser Shohoud's Real World XML Web Services: For VB and VB .NET Developers.  If you read through these books and understand the zen of .NET Remoting, COM+ and XML Web Services, the rest is cream cheese.  You'll also find these books go a long way to helping you with the 70-300 exam (think questions like “you are writing a component that will be using distributed transactions.  What type of component should you create: remoted, serviced, normal class or a module?). I'd avoid the Microsoft Training Kits or whatever.  This exam is far too large and in charge to be covered properly in an exam prep book properly.  Learn the technologies and pass the exam.  As for practice tests and the such, I'm sure they are all fine.  SelfTest software seems to have a good coverage of the range of knowledge being tested, and Transcender has always put out quality stuff.  I've seen some people complain that the questions don't look at all like the questions on the Microsoft exam, but the point of practice questions is to judge how well you know the material, not to get you ready for specific exam questions.  And if you plan on using Brain dumps, well, you are a bad person and a moron to boot.  Posted Apr 13 2004, 10:01 AM by Phil Scott with 4 comment(s)

• Holy Crap, they are coming to Louisville

  I notice that the Visual Basic World Tour is coming to beautiful Louisville, KY.  Normally the 16th largest city in the US gets the shaft when it comes to Microsoft events so I usually miss out on these things while Cincinatti (aka the armpit of america) gets all the love.  But not this time baby!  Granted it is “only” the Visual Basic World Tour, but it's a step in the right direction, and not something cool like DevDays or even AdminNights (bow chica wa-wa).  But it's a step in the right direction.  The right direction being, as usual, me getting more free uglyass XL t-shirts.  They are of course a week early.  The following week they'd get to check out the steamboat race, or the thing where companies compete to see how far they can pull a UPS cargo jet all in the name of Derby festivities.  Good times. So, anyone else going to this thing? Posted Apr 13 2004, 08:12 AM by Phil Scott with 6 comment(s)

• ooooh, this is one nasty IE vulnerbility

  There's a pretty nasty vulnerbility in IE's ITS protocol.  CERN has a write up about it.  Here's a proof of concept that over writes your wmplayer.exe, and launches it.  Definitely not good times here.  Overwriting system files and basically launching whatever code you want. I heard about something like this last week, but I can't quite remember the source of the info.  It's also being said on slashdot that there are already people taking advantage of this in the wild (surprise, surprise).  Between IE being a complete and utter joke of web browser when it comes to implementing CSS and any type of web standard, the thing is completely insecure.  The only reason anyone can give for a rational reason to use it would be that they are locked in because some custom control / their design was for whatever reason designed by eight year olds, and requires IE.  Normally I reserve cricism about microsoft products because I'm afraid someone from that product's team will read this, but I'm about 99% certain that IE simply doesn't have developers working on anything besides what will be coming out in 2-3 years with Longhorn.  And I'm sure that will be a fine, web standard browser.  Right guys? Posted Apr 09 2004, 08:06 AM by Phil Scott with 10 comment(s)

• More Ego Stroking Google Searches

  Follow Adam's lead, here are some of the searches the frequently drop people at my site according to my referal log: gzip IIS.  I am somehow #1 for this.  Rock on. Picking a motherboard.  Ha, I bet people get pissed off when turning to that post for information. Ordering Pizza  #3, baby.  Apache vs IIS.  #2.  Underpants Gnomes.  Also #2 Popping Zits.  Top 10. I'm sure there are more, but I've already spread far too much information to provide myself with much more google juice.  My most common hits are for people misspelling things.  I am a terrible speller and even worse of a proof reader, so this results in tons of hits for things like StickeyKeys (note the extra e in sticky).  Good times. While I was at this, I did a quick check and have noticed I've sky rocketed to #2 in Google for Phil Scott, which is nice.  I'm still getting beat out by the infamous Dr. Phil Scott from Ottawa, but one day with any luck that spot will be all mine.  I can't even find my other site on the list when it comes to Phil Scott.  Make this will help:  Phil Scott.  (note: that site is mostly my friends trying to coordinate drinking plans for the weekend and complaining about each other's spelling, so don't expect much). Posted Apr 02 2004, 11:11 AM by Phil Scott with no comments