SteveOH

I was contacted by a Public Relations individual from uCertify who requested me to review their product.  This was quite some time ago, and since I had never used their product before, decided to test their test preparation software out in addition to others.  This short review will not mention other applications, suites or books for the preparation for this exam, only the uCertify application.

The first thing you’ll notice when you download the program, is that they offer a few things.  First, there’s 100% money back guarantee that you’ll pass the test on the first try.  That’s enticing and speaks volumes on their product.  Unfortunately, the money back guarantee is on the ~$70 you spent on the program, and not the $150+ on the exam, but alas, something is better than nothing.  At the very least, you can use that money and try again on the exam (or buy a different prep book).

Second, they offer 2 flavors of their software: a full and free (demo) version.   The demo version has a few questions, enough to give you an idea of what’s going on, but not enough for you to do anything with (ie. pass the test, study from, etc).

Lastly, I like the fact that they give you directions on how to download and install the application.  That’s very thoughtful for users who may not be highly technical but want to be, and are therefore attempting to get certified in a particular technology (this is becoming more and more common, even though the certification is supposed to be taken after experience has been attained in the work place, to validate your skills).

So let’s run the application.

As a software developer myself, I have to say that I like the initial interface a lot.  Everything is very well place and easy to navigate.  The demo version only has a Diagnostic Test (15 questions), Create a Custom Test and Create a Fixed Time Test available to you in the main navigation section.  The “Enhance your understanding” section on the right hand side has all of the items available, which are basically extras to give you an ‘edge’.  It’s mostly general information, some tips, and other resources you can find on the internet.  You don’t need this section, but it’s nice to have everything in one place anyway.

uCertify has their advertisements all over the place “Buy the full version”, which makes me laugh.  That’s what they’re supposed to do, and they do a pretty good job in keeping it in your face as you go through the demo.

Diagnostic Test:

I ran it with 10 total questions, 10 minute duration and a passing score of 730.  I also selected the “Always show last answer option as ‘None of the above’” which I believe to be crucial in getting you to think critically.  Why?  Because everyone will default themselves to “the answer must not be here” if they can’t figure it out or come up with an answer based on incorrect assumptions.  Since it’s there all the time, and you won’t know when it’s a valid option, you’ll definitely think twice before choosing it.  In my courses, I always have this option available to students.

Well, the first thing I noticed while taking the Diagnostic Quiz is that my settings didn’t stick.  I noticed at the bottom that I was on question 10 of 15 (I said a max of 10) and that the “Always show ‘none of the above’” wasn’t being shown on all questions.  Maybe this is reduced functionality for the demo, but it would have been nice to see that stated.

I found the questions a bit vague.  They’re not meant to confuse you, but require a good understanding of the underlying topic for you to know what they’re referring to.  The application does assist you with some background information and explanation, but I don’t believe it to be enough for a full understanding of the topics, but again, they are quite helpful.

The results page is fairly straight forward.  A little hard to read, maybe alternating row colors would have been nicer on the eyes.  Anyway, it tells you what you did right and wrong.  Clicking on the question will take you to the page of that question, with the answer you gave and why you were right or wrong, along with those ‘Facts’ that help you solidify your understanding.

I really like the Readiness report, which gives you a summary on how you’ve done on all the exams (there are 5 practice tests, a final test, and a diagnostic test – 423 questions in total).  They also provide an adaptive test, but that functionality is not available, so I cannot comment on it.

All in all, I believe this to be a good product.  It’s obvious the uCertify is trying to get you to pass the test, as they provide you with several ways of doing so.  If I were going to use this product, I would read a book prior to build a decent foundation, and then polish my skills and knowledge off with this application and its exams.  If you did that, you would have taken 7 tests in the uCertify application, and an additional 1 or 2 in the Microsoft book, for a total of 8 or 9.  You would iterate through the content and examinations enough to know what you have to study and understand better, and know where your strengths are.

If you used the approach above, it would cost you about $100 (Microsoft Self-Paced Certification Books – really the only books available for MCTS-ASP.NET) and $60 for the uCertify application.  That’s $160 in prep (and maybe 1 – 3 months) and then the cost of the exam, which is about $200 or so (don’t quote me on that).  When you buy the Microsoft books, you get a voucher for a discount on the actual exam, so that helps. I believe it to be worth it.

The feedback from the exams is that you need to really memorize the book’s content and have lots of coding experience (more project experience than just slapping code together).  In that respect, an application such as this one will really help you with that, as they ask you real-world type questions.  The link below is to a site of a gentlemen who gives his experience from taking the exam: here

Rating of the Application:

Visual Appeal: 8
Question Difficulty: 8
Extra Content to Help (ie. Tips): 10
Number of Questions / Exams: 9
Reporting: 9
Exam Preparedness: 8.5
Overall: 8.75

I would say this system will help anyone pass the exam, as long as they have the knowledge.  I would / will use this system in the future.

Take a look for yourself: http://www.ucertify.com/exams/Microsoft/70-536-VB.html

You can receive a 10% discount on any certification course you wish to attend using the code STEVEH.  Thank you to Roger and uCertify for their generosity.

Should I stay or should I go … with Visual Studio 2005 or 2008 is the question in this particular case. One of my customers is still on Visual Studio 2003 and they are wondering whether to upgrade to VS 2005 or to VS 2008.

Are there reasons for moving to VS 2005 instead of 2008 even though 2008 is so close to release? Minimizing risk is probably the major driver for deciding on VS 2005. After all, it’s been out in the market for almost two years and it’s stable and mature. There’s also the common wisdom that you shouldn’t deploy a Microsoft product that doesn’t have at least one service pack. Mind you that SP1 for Visual Studio didn’t come out until 12 months after the release of the product. Microsoft is no longer in the mode where the Service Pack has to hit 6 months after release because there were quality issues that needed to be fixed.

When it comes to determining to move to the newer Visual Studio 2008 and the .NET Framework 3.5 there are more points to consider:

1) Stability and maturity of the underlying framework and consequently the applications you’re building on top of the framework.

2) Stability and maturity of new features added with VS 2008

3) Product Support differences.

4) Productivity benefits of VS 2008 compared to VS 2005.

Let’s dive a little deeper and examine each of these points:

1) Enhancements to the .NET Framework are built around the stable core of Version 2.0 that ship with Visual Studio 2005, when additions like generics and partial classes required modifying the CLR.

Version 3.0 added to the core set of .NET 2.0, but does not change the core CLR. New functionality is packed in new assemblies, e.g. System.ServiceModel. There were some minor changes to some of the library assemblies, e.g. System.Runtime.Serialization to accommodate new WCF functionality, but by all and large 3.0 is built around the solid core of the CLR and the BCL of 2.0.

Version 3.5 follows the same approach. The 2.0 CLR/BCL core remains largely untouched. New features are either implemented at the compiler level or in the System. Core assembly. Scott Hanselman (who’s finally joined Microsoft) confirmed this claim by doing some deeper research recently. He compared the core libraries that shipped with VS 2005 and the Beta 2 release of .NET 3.5 and found that the percentage of churn was in the single digits.

Since the .NET Runtime and the core libraries are pretty much the same between VS 2005 and VS 2008, there’s no increased risk for applications that leverage core .NET functionality only.

2) Now that we realized that .NET is very stable at its core, let’s look at the additional functionality that’s new with .NET 3.5. There are quite a number of new features (WCF, WPF, Visual Studio, Linq, too many others), but this particular customer is very interested in the new AJAX features. Again, the core framework code at the ASP.NET Ajax framework level has been in the public as a CTP since 2006 and has been RTM since early 2007. The Visual Studio 2008 release is adding more server side control features (for example control extenders), but the core has been publicly available as a preview release for more than 18 months. Another customer I work with is running one of the world’s largest eCommerce sites on top of AJAX some of these CTP bits without impact to their business.

Visual Studio 2008 adds design time tools and more server controls for richer UIs and better communication between the client-side code and the server. Those features are very helpful and the runtime features have been available in CTPs for a while.
Finally, one more risk mitigation factor to consider is recent announcement that source code (with comments) and debugging symbols are going to be available with Visual Studio 2008 and .NET Framework 3.5. If you’re running into issues, you have the unprecedented ability to trouble shoot and diagnose problems.

With all that, my take would be (if I was an architect that didn’t work for Microsoft) that risk from new framework libraries around ASP.NET AJAX is manageable. In other areas, you get all the fixes for .NET 3.0 SP1, which means there’s actually a benefit of fewer pieces to install. The remaining risk is the new code in System.Core and in some other places. Still, I’d feel good about moving to 2008.

3) Now, you may argue that the tools are still new, and there’s some truth in that. Even though the quality of Visual Studio has been pretty good, much better than in the 90s when I first looked at Microsoft tools, but new code is always new risk. One could argue that VS 2005 + VS 2005 SP1 + .NET 3.0 + .NET 3.0 SP1 + ASP.NET AJAX RTM + AJAX Control Toolkit + ASP.NET AJAX Futures CTP gives me the same capabilities as VS 2008 with more stable, proven code. But consider this: The AJAX Control Toolkit is released under a community license, which means there’s not official product support through the Premier Support channels. The ASP.NET AJAX Futures CTP delivers some of the cool improvements over RTM, but the CTP is an unsupported product. The new controls that ship with VS 2008 are fully supported.

You’re actually increasing risk a little bit by staying with Visual Studio 2005 because of a few unsupported bits and you’re greatly increasing complexity of your install process. With VS 2008 you get the stable service pack code for Visual Studio and .NET 2.0 and 3.0 and you get all that in a single install and you get all that in a single install which reduces complexity and consequently risk and cost of deployment. I give that one to Visual Studio 2008.

4) Yes, there is new code in Visual Studio 2008 and there better be . VS 2005 has been lacking the tool support to take full advantage of the .NET 3.0 platform. VS 2005 shipped with .NET 2.0, remember? The .NET 3.0 release was only a framework release. The tool support for WPF, WCF and ASP.NET AJAX is finally shipping with VS 2008.

The improved Javascript IntelliSense support alone is a great enhancement for somebody like me that delegates mundane tasks like remembering method overloads and signatures to IntelliSense. AJAX was painful because IntelliSense in the code editor was rather limited.

Then there’s the client-side JavaScript debugging Scott Guthrie was talking about. You now can set breakpoints from the start, debug and inspect javascript variables with property grids, visualizers and an immediate window just like you can in with managed code on the server.

Then there are other very helpful new features, like the ability call WCF JSON services, the Web Designer with rich CSS Support or the built-in support to make the back button AJAX aware with the history control and, of course , Linq. There are many other exciting new features, too many others to list here, but the bottom line is, there are numerous reasons why VS 2008 is the better choice for developing AJAX enabled sites.

Finally, you could argue that VS 2008 actually gives you the best of both worlds because VS 2008 lets you target different versions of the .NET Runtime. If you’re feeling very strongly about shipping applications on the 2.0 bits or the 3.0 bits, you can still take advantage of the new productivity enhancements in the IDE but build against the framework version of your choice.That’s a great combination or productivity and stable code to optimize for low risk.

Published Monday, October 08, 2007 9:01 AM by ChristophDotNet

A little while ago I posted the specs of the new tablet I had purchased off eBay. I got it at a steal of about $300. It was used (a little more used than I would have preferred) but they were just cosmetic imperfections that I could certainly live with. Gotta love eBay.

But I wanted to give some time of use with the tablet before I made a decision of whether it was a good buy, my thoughts on its functionality and usability, and overall feeling of the unit.

Well, for starters I have to say that the RAM is lacking. Mine actually had 512 MB and it’s still a bit sluggish with applications running (Adobe Acrobat Pro 8.0 and OneNote 2007). With both of these apps running, my system has only ~40MB of RAM free, but the processor is at around 10% usage, so the memory is the bottleneck with respect to running applications and responsiveness. However, the CPU will of course spike to 100% when writing in OneNote. This is expected, since the system must compute your movements, pen pressure and fluidity on the fly.

Other than that, I really can’t complain. I upgraded the Hard Drive to a 60GB 7200RPM drive, which runs nice and has plenty of space. Additionally, I plan on (of course) purhcasing a gig of RAM for it, at which point I’m sure she’ll run just lovely.

The usability of the tablet is awesome. I’m a student and a professional, so lugging around my 7 lbs Dell E1505 with 17″ screen is a hassle. Although it blows the specs out of the water, it’s mobility, down and dirty features for convenience (the function buttons on the screen, etc), and light weight (under 2 or 3 lbs I believe) are excellent.

Lastly, I purchased this tablet for the following purposes:

1. Light weight system to read eBooks and other electronic format books
2. System to work on school work as well as troubleshoot network / system issues

I had initially purchased a Sony PRS-500 eBook reader for ~$200. It’s a great little unit (although there’s plenty of room for improvement), but found that it was horrible for reading PDF files. And when I say horrible, I mean it. If you wanted to actually be able to read them, you would have to spend about 2 hours of format conversions, etc etc to get it to a point where it’s actually readable. 2 hours, yea right. I immediately started looking for something else. So I came across a tablet (I have a co-worker who’s always said tablets were awesome) and found this great deal on eBay. I sold my PRS-500 for and purchased the Tablet, putting the difference in cash (about $100). The tablet did everything the PRS-500 can do, and more. It’s not as light, and not as small. However, the Lifebook was made to be outside viewable (a shortcoming of LCD screens) so it’s very bright. Additionally, I can view ANY format I want, since there are free viewers out there for every format you can put a document into. PDF’s look great, and reading them off a 12″ screen (as opposed to a 6″ screen) is ideal. Additionally, I can use it at work and at remote locations, as well as take it to class. Which leads me to my third reason.

Textbooks cost hundreds of dollars a semester. This current semester my books were going to come to $300. That’s for 1 course! I had a great idea though… since I have this reader, why don’t I just download / buy the eBook versions, which are usually at a discount?! So that’s what I did. It’s awesome!

Additionally, I can use it to take notes. I don’t know about you, but I’m a geek. If I could have everything digitally and on a computer, I would. So, I take notes in class using the unit, and it’s superb. Great responsiveness, I can use colors, I can copy and paste images into them, etc etc. I can print them out if I need to (printing quality is also quite nice), and I don’t have to lug around a note book, books, and a laptop. Everything’s in the one unit!

So, I have concluded that I will never purchase another laptop.  Since a tablet (not a slate) can be both a tablet and a laptop, what’s the point of buying one that can only do one function?  Additionally, a system with dual cores should run just lovely, since one processor can concentrate on the text translation while the other runs the OS, or both at the same time to make things a lot quicker.  Dell just came out with a tablet that’s quite thin and has great specs.  The only downside I can see from the tablet is it’s cost.  Since it’s new, cool, small and light, and can be as powerful as some other systems out there, it costs more.

If you’re not a student, write a lot, or a professional who can use a light and mobile system to get work done, take notes at meetings, etc etc, then a tablet wouldn’t be for you.  Tablets are great for me though .

Specifications

Manufacturer:

Fujitsu

Part number:

FPCM10241

General

Platform Technology

Intel Centrino

System Type

Tablet PC

Built-in Devices

Wireless LAN antenna, SmartCard reader/writer

Width

11.5 in

Depth

9.3 in

Height

1.4 in

Weight

4.2 lbs

Processor

Processor

Intel Pentium M 1.4 GHz

Data bus speed

400 MHz

Processor features

Enhanced SpeedStep technology

Chipset type

Intel 855GM

Cache Memory

Type

L2 cache

Cache size

1 MB

RAM

Installed Size

256 MB / 2 GB(max)

Technology

DDR SDRAM – 266 MHz

Memory specification compliance

DDR266/PC2100

Storage Controller

Storage controller type

IDE

Storage

Floppy Drive

None

Hard Drive

40 GB

Storage Removable

None

Optical Storage (2nd)

2nd optical storage type

None

Display

Display Type

12.1 in TFT active matrix

Max Resolution

1024 x 768

Color support

24-bit (16.7 million colors)

Video

Graphics Processor / Vendor

Intel 855GM – AGP

Video Memory

Shared video memory (UMA)

Audio

Audio output type

Sound card

Audio output compliant standards

AC ’97

Input Device(s)

Input device type

Keyboard, Touchpad, Digitizer, Digital pen, Scroll button

Telecom

Modem

Fax / modem

Max transfer rate

56 Kbps

Protocols & Specifications

ITU V.90

Networking

Networking

Network adapter

Networking / Wireless LAN Supported

Yes

Data link protocol

Ethernet, IEEE 802.11b, Fast Ethernet

Networking standards

IEEE 802.11b

Expansion / Connectivity

Expansion Bays

None

Expansion Slots Total (Free)

2 ( 1 ) x Memory, 1 ( 1 ) x CardBus – Type III (2 x type I / II)

Interfaces

2 x Hi-Speed USB – 4 pin USB Type A, 1 x Modem – Phone line – RJ-11, 1 x Network – Ethernet 10Base-T/100Base-TX – RJ-45, 1 x Display / video – VGA – 15 pin HD D-Sub (HD-15), 1 x Infrared – IrDA, 1 x Headphones – Output – Mini-phone stereo 3.5 mm, 1 x Microphone – Input – Mini-phone 3.5 mm, 1 x Docking / port replicator

Miscellaneous

Features

Security lock slot (cable lock sold separately)

Compliant Standards

CUL, TUV, EN55022, EN55024, EN 60950, ICES-003, UL 60950, CISPR 22 Class B, FCC Class B certified, FCC Class C certified

Power

Power device form factor

External

Voltage Required

AC 120/230 V ( 50/60 Hz)

Battery

Technology

Lithium ion

Installed Qty

1

Mfr estimated battery life

4.5 hour(s)

Operating System / Software

OS Provided

Microsoft Windows XP Tablet PC Edition

Software type

Zinio Reader, Microsoft Reader, NewsStand Reader, Drivers & Utilities, Fujitsu HotKey Utility, Microsoft Internet Explorer, FranklinCovey TabletPlanner (Trial), PowerQuest Drive Image Special Edition

Manufacturer Warranty

Service & support type

1 year warranty

Service & Support Details

Limited warranty – 1 year