Which of the following access control systems listed below allows the owner of a resource to establish access permissions to that resource?

A. DAC

B. MAC

C. RBAC

D. None of the above.

The answer to this question is in the comments.

Which two methods, of the choices given, are valid for developing task duration estimates? (Choose only two)

A. Value engineering

B. Bottoms-up estimating

C. Historical data

D. Expert judgement

E. Stochastic estimating

The answer for this question is in the comments.

What is generally considered the main objective of analyzing the course material and learner information?

A. To adjust and match the course materials to fit the learner's needs

B. To check for inaccurate or out of date material

C. To create a report for the instructional designer

D. To become familiar with the course materials

The answer to this question will be in the comments.

What is generally considered the core function of the project manager?

A. Client interface

B. Systems design

C. Project integration

D. Quality assurance

E. Meeting coordinator

The answer to this question is in the comments.

If an instructor delievers the same course multiple times and each time experiences the same failure, what competency is this insructor failing to address properly?

A. Evaluate course delievery

B. Analyze course material and instruction

C. Evaluate learner performance

D. Use media effectively

Answer will be supplied in the comments.

Well after much thought I have come to the conclusion that I need to blog more often. I am simply just not using this medium effectively enough. So I have thought about creating a series that I can sink my teeth into. I am thinking about writing sample test questions to some of the more popular certifications out there such as Security+, Project+ and some of the new updated Microsoft .Net 2.0 certs for the MCPD Enterprise Application Developer. The reason is that I am studying for all of those certifications and this will help me study and hopefully down the road help those that wish to take these tests as well.

So hopefully later today I will have written some of the sample test questions and then start posting them on a daily basis, or as often as I humanly can so that this blog will become more of a resource like I intended it to be. Look in the near future for these questions as I do plan on posting them quite soon.

I have a new motto that I am going to use for the rest of the year. It really sums up life sometimes.

"Life is supposed to be a bit nuts...otherwise it would just be a bunch of Thursdays strung together."

Sorry for the non technical post. I try to keep this blog on topic as much as possible however there are times when I need to just vent out a bit.

The Windows Communication Foundation is one of the fundamental key components of what is now called .Net 3.0.  However, this enhancement comes with a price, a steep learning curve. Without this book by Juval Lowy I doubt many programmers would have the proper guidance necessary to make good design decisions. You see that is what Juval Lowy set out to do in his latest book and I think he did a fabulous job! This book is not for the novice programmer it should be warned, but rather the experienced developer who desires to push his or her skills to the next level.

From the very first chapter this book had me hooked. I rarely read technical books all the way through in one sitting however that is exactly what I did with this book. The first chapter starts to explain in plain English what WCF is exactly and from then on the content just gets deeper and deeper.

Now it must be said that I am not an software architect by any means however this book helped to give me more of an architectural viewpoint which could only improve my skill set. The design guidelines and best practices are clearly laid out so that anyone with some programming experience should be able to understand. This is not your average computer text which gives a chunk of code and then explains what it does.  There really is nothing average about this writer and book.

If you believe that anytime in the near future you will need to understand WCF for your work I would highly recommend picking up a copy of this book. It is not for the feint of heart but the journey is well worth it.

The Windows Workflow Foundation is part of what is now .Net 3.0. Since this is the direction that we all seem to be heading in getting some solid information on subject is paramount. Fortunately we have a good resource in the book Foundations of WF by Brian R. Myers.

The premise of this book is to provide an introduction to the concepts, techniques and quirks of the Windows Workflow Foundation. It is not an exhaustive text explaining every nuance of the framework. Rather, this seems to be a somewhat of a high level approach of introducing the subject matter.

Throughout the text of the book plenty of example code is provided. As I really have no means at this time of testing the code myself I can not validate its accuracy. I am assuming the technical editors of the book have already done this but I have been fooled before.

What I did find disappointing is that only one chapter covers the integration with the Microsoft Office Server System 2007. This is disappointing to me as this is the new realm of where software developers are now able to venture into. However, I would like to point out that this chapter does cover the subject matter fairly well however it would be nice to see more titles from Apress covering this subject.

To give an overview of what is covered I will include the table of contents as such:

Chapter 1 – Introduction to Workflow and Windows Workflow Foundation

Chapter 2 – First Workflow

Chapter 3 – Conditional Activities

Chapter 4 – Flow Activities

Chapter 5 – Rules Based Workflow

Chapter 6 – Workflow and web services

Chapter 7 – Interacting with workflow

Chapter 8 – Custom Activities

Chapter 9 - Deploying Workflow Applications

Chapter 10 – Employee and performance review application

Chapter 11 – Integration with Office 2007

The chapter covering the reference application is actually also quite good. The application is not something I would deploy in a real world scenario per se but it does cover many of the fundamentals necessary to get a firm grasp of the concepts in action.

Overall I believe this to be a good work and worth the money if you wish to be introduced to Windows Workflow Foundation. However if you are looking for something more in depth look elsewhere as I believe more in depth texts are starting to become available.

Foundations of WF: an Introduction to Windows Workflow Foundation (Expert's Voice in .Net)

Recently I have had the pleasure of reading a great book called Accelerated C# 2005 by Trey Nash. I found this book to be both insightful and informative on many levels. Now I am already familiar with C# 2.0 so this book did not necessarily teach me anything particularly new to the language. However the points that Mr. Nash brought out while using C# have helped quite a bit.

This book is not your normal C# training manual. Rather, the approach of the author is to take you through the language as if you were an already experienced programmer. I find that approach to be a bit refreshing from the standard explain a bit about a subject, show the code move on approach to writing these types of books.

Of all the chapters that I found to be particularly good were the chapters on Generics and Delegates. Generics are still a new subject for me and any new insights I can get on how this is supposed to help is much appreciated! The material in that chapter I believe to be worth the price of the book alone.

To give you a listing of what is in store if you should buy this book here is a listing of the table of contents.

Chapter 1 – C# Preview

Chapter 2 – C# and the CLR

Chapter 3 – C# Syntax Overview

Chapter 4 – Classes, Structs and Objects

Chapter 5 – Interfaces and Contracts

Chapter 6 – Overloading Operators

Chapter 7 – Exception Handling and Exception Safety

Chapter 8 – Working with Strings

Chapter 9 – Arrays, Collection Types, and Iterators

Chapter 10 – Delegates, Anonymous Functions and Events

Chapter 11 – Generics

Chapter 12 – Threading in C#

Chapter 13 – In Search of Canonical Forms

The final chapter of this book, chapter 13, was particularly good in defining some of the best practices when designing and building software. The revelations that this chapter showed me I believe in the long run will help me to be a better developer. Now I do not necessarily agree with all of the best practices outlined in this chapter I will give it some thought when designing software in the future.

Personally I would recommend this book for anyone wanting to get into writing C# programs rapidly. This book is however designed for an experienced developer and I would recommend if you are new to programming that you shy away from this book to start and then later pick yourself up a copy.

Recently I have been reading some really great tutorials on the Validation Application Block by David Hayden on his blog. For those that do not already know David Hayden is one of the few great bloggers out there that actually create well crafted blog posts that actually help us out. He certainly makes me look bad that is for sure, I have to work much harder to get to his level. Perhaps that is osmething I can work on next year? Perhaps, my friends.

This is what he has written about so far.

Validation Application Block in Enterprise Library 3.0 - Using Validation Facade Class - Part I

Validation Application Block in Enterprise Library 3.0 - ValidationFactory Class - Part II

Validation Application Block Ruleset in Enterprise Library 3.0 - Enterprise Library 3.0 Tutorials - Part III

Validation Application Block - Rules in External XML Configuration File - App.Config Web.Config - Enterprise Library 3.0 - Part IV

Validation Application Block - Business Layer and Data Access Layer Integration - Part V

If it were not for David Hayden's efforts I am sure many would be blind as to how to proceed in utilizing this tool that Microsoft has provided. Good work as always David!

Recently I have been trying out some new techniques in order to get some more high quality traffic to some of the websites I own. Some of these websites have a coresponding blog related to the website in order to get more exposure. I have found one particular program to be particularly good in increasing traffic to these blogs and then to my website as a result. The program I use is called Blog Blaster. It has a simple to use interface and you can add more pinging services that come with the software which is really helpful as well.

Also I have found that these services are the most useful

http://1470.net/api/ping
http://www.a2b.cc/setloc/bp.a2b
http://api.feedster.com/ping
http://api.moreover.com/RPC2
http://api.moreover.com/ping
http://api.my.yahoo.com/RPC2
http://api.my.yahoo.com/rss/ping
http://www.bitacoles.net/ping.php
http://bitacoras.net/ping
http://blogdb.jp/xmlrpc
http://www.blogdigger.com/RPC2
http://blogmatcher.com/u.php
http://www.blogoole.com/ping/
http://www.blogoon.net/ping/
http://www.blogpeople.net/servlet/weblogUpdates
http://www.blogroots.com/tb_populi.blog?id=1
http://www.blogshares.com/rpc.php
http://www.blogsnow.com/ping
http://www.blogstreet.com/xrbin/xmlrpc.cgi
http://blog.goo.ne.jp/XMLRPC
http://bulkfeeds.net/rpc
http://coreblog.org/ping/
http://www.lasermemory.com/lsrpc/
http://mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatt
http://www.mod-pubsub.org/kn_apps/blogchatter/ping.php
http://www.newsisfree.com/xmlrpctest.php
http://ping.amagle.com/
http://ping.bitacoras.com
http://ping.blo.gs/
http://ping.bloggers.jp/rpc/
http://ping.blogmura.jp/rpc/
http://ping.cocolog-nifty.com/xmlrpc
http://ping.exblog.jp/xmlrpc
http://ping.feedburner.com
http://ping.myblog.jp
http://ping.rootblog.com/rpc.php
http://ping.syndic8.com/xmlrpc.php
http://ping.weblogalot.com/rpc.php
http://ping.weblogs.se/
http://pingoat.com/goat/RPC2
http://www.popdex.com/addsite.php
http://rcs.datashed.net/RPC2/
http://rpc.blogbuzzmachine.com/RPC2
http://rpc.blogrolling.com/pinger/
http://rpc.icerocket.com:10080/
http://rpc.pingomatic.com/
http://rpc.technorati.com/rpc/ping
http://rpc.weblogs.com/RPC2
http://www.snipsnap.org/RPC2
http://trackback.bakeinu.jp/bakeping.php
http://topicexchange.com/RPC2
http://www.weblogues.com/RPC/
http://xping.pubsub.com/ping/
http://xmlrpc.blogg.de/

I hope this ends up helping someone out there!

Recently my Mom has had some serious issue with the Best Buy Customer Service here in Sarasota, Florida. It has gotten so bad that I have decided to blog about it so maybe it will catch their attention. We will see if they follow Robert Scoble’s advice and listen to the bloggers out there. With this being a holiday season I would expect better service from such a well known and respected company.

Here is the issue my Mom ordered a washer and dryer set from the Best Buy appliance department and they scheduled for delivery a whole nine days ahead. Since the house is run on gas she needed to call a plumber in to disconnect the old dryer. As it approached the time for the delivery she was told that the Sarasota store would call ahead to schedule a time for the delivery drivers to come. No one called the night before. She called the store at 6 P.M. and did not get through until 9 P.M. that is three hours for them not to answer the phone. Talk about poor customer service! As it became apparent that the washer and dryer was not going to be delivered she decided she was just too upset with the whole situation and decided to cancel the entire order. Now every time that my Mom tries to cancel this one order of over two thousand dollars she is told she cannot because the washer and dryer is scheduled to be delivered for whatever day she comes in to cancel the order. What a runaround! Basically Best Buy has taken two thousand dollars from my Mom and not delivered anything. The washer and dryer were charged to her account without actual delivery. I did not think that was possible in this day and age but I guess it is.

Hopefully Best Buy will straighten this out sometime soon before we need to go to small claims court about it. Perhaps the local news stations here in the Tampa Bay would like to broadcast this story on their channel. Maybe that is the only way for someone down here to get the work done! I think Best Buy has lost some customers!

Well I guess many of have heard already that Internet Explorer version 7 is soon to be available as a priority download to all Windows XP users. Is this a good thing or a bad thing? Personally I believe that this is a very good thing as Internet Explorer 7 is supposed to drastically increase the level of secrurity and usability for all. Also the level of compliance to standards is known to be improved on this release IE7 and the level of CSS compliance is quite similiar to the ever so popular Firefox and Mozilla browsers.

One of the best new features of this browser is the integrated RSS capabilities of this browser. Now I am a huge fan of the RSS Bandit aggregator but I would like to try something new. Also the tabs feature is quite nice, especially if you have been used to using Firefox as the functionality is quite similiar.

I believe that this browser will help improve Microsoft's reputation by delievering a high quality, high secure application. Now go update your computer with this new version. I think you may be very pleased.

Just a quick reminder to those that read my blog that we here in Sarasota will be having another meeting for our small but rapidly growing .Net Developer Group. The details are as follows:

November 2006 Meeting:

Introduction to WCF - Windows Communication Framework - by Jeff Barnes (Microsoft) 

Just a quick reminder for us all living down here in Sarasota that there is another Sarasotadev meeting this September 12th. The details are as follows:

2007 Office System as a Solutions Platform by Microsoft's David McNamee

This meeting will be on Tuesday, September 12, 2006 at 6pm. Location: Sarasota Community Foundation, located at 2635 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota, FL 34237 (just west of Tuttle on the north side of Fruitville).

The release of Office 2007 and SharePoint Server 2007 is quickly approaching.  Come learn what is available for developers in these new releases and how Office System can become an integral part of your custom solutions.  We will also demonstrate building an end-to-end solution using Office and SharePoint.

David brings his experience as an enterprise developer, architect, and trainer to helping customers unlock their business information by using the Office System as a rich developer platform. There is nothing that cannot be solved with the creative application of the .NET Framework, Office System, and Windows Mobile! Find David's blog here.

It seems like to be a good meeting and since Sharepoint and the 2007 Office system seems to be where Microsoft is headed it might be a good idea for all software developers to attend this meeting. The community foundation is always a good place to meet as they have by far one of the best meeting facilities in the area and the staff is very friendly and welcoming. If you are a not for profit organization then I would highly recommend using this resource in the area.

Just a quick note that I updated my personal website with some more content today. It is something I was meaning to do for a long time but have finally got my act together and resolved that this was the time to update that stagnant website. I added some of the more popular articles that were on my old blog and updated them for today. A quick tutorial was added on how to perform a really basic mode statistic with SQL. Anyways more additions are soon to come so check back often.

You can visit my personal website here.

http://www.richard-callaby.net

Just as a friendly reminder to all those here in Sarasota that we have an upcoming Sarasotadev meeting sponsored by INETA. I recently received a reminder from Stan Schultes reminding the group that Tim Huckaby is coming to give a presentation on Architecting and Building Workflow Solutions and Smart Client Development. It should be an interesting event.

The details I received were the following:

August 2006 SarasotaDev meeting:
Architecting and Building Workflow Solutions and Smart Client Development - by Tim Huckaby

This meeting will be on Thursday, August 17, 2006 at 6pm. Location: Sarasota Community Foundation, located at 2635 Fruitville Rd., Sarasota, FL 34237 (just west of Tuttle on the north side of Fruitville).

This two hour session will overview Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), and then Tim shows off his bag of tricks for developing smart client apps. This is a must-see session - Tim is immensely entertaining and knows his stuff like no other...

Architecting and Building Workflow Solutions with InfoPath, WF and SPS V3
In this session you will learn how to build custom workflow solutions with Visual Studio 2005.  You’ll learn how to integrate those workflows into SharePoint, and how to interact with workflows using InfoPath.  This session focuses on the power and developer productivity of workflow solutions built on WF.  WF is a powerful technology and this session will delve into the tips and tricks, positives and negatives when designing and building workflow solutions with WF.

Windows Workflow Foundation (WF), a platform component and part of the Windows plumbing included with the WinFx runtime, has an extensible programming model and runtime components to make powerful workflow solutions.  Couple WF with the latest version of SharePoint Portal Server (v3.0) Infrastructure and InfoPath Forms backed by managed code and you have quite a powerful set of tools, plumbing and infrastructure to build powerful and scalable workflow solutions with ease. 

This combination of technologies addresses one of the biggest challenges that .NET solution developers face today – workflow.

Smart Client Development
In the second hour, Tim will highlight smart client development by showing a bunch of demos from his developer bag of tricks.

Tim Huckaby is a Microsoft Regional Director and well-known international speaker.

On Tuesday, September 12, 2006 we've got a visit lined up by Microsoft's David McNamee of Tampa, who will talk about the upcoming Microsoft Office 2007 Server System (MOSS).

On Wed, October 11, 2006, we've got another superstar lined up in Miguel Castro, an author, speaker, and independent consultant in the NY/NJ metro area who specializes in building web server controls and .NET applications.

Rory Blyth has put together a nice set of screencasts on how to develop applications on Windows Mobile 5.0. These screencasts cover the whole range of topics that you would need in order to get started developing on this platform. I have personally viewed several of these screencasts and the quality of their presentation is what you would expect from Rory - meaning quite darn good.

You can catch all of these screencasts that are uploaded to Channel9 through the following links.

• An Introduction To Windows Mobile Development
• Building a Simple Web Browser With the .NET CF 2.0
• A Simple Data Driven Windows Mobile App Using SQL Server Mobile
• Data Synching: Part One
• Data Synching: Part Two
• Windows Mobile 5.0: State Notification API
• Windows Mobile 5.0: Pocket Outlook Object Model
• Windows Mobile 5.0: Camera API

I can only hope in the future deliever the same amount of material at the same level as Rory. He sets the bar for us all.

Perhaps you may have noticed that none of my posts actually ever contain any code. The reason is simple I have never found a nice way of posting code on my blog without it looking like crap. However I believe there may be a solution to my problem. You see there is this guy named Noah Coad who developed a way for all of us to create well formated code in our blog posts.

Basically what Noah did was create a Word Macro that will automatically format code pasted into the clipboard that you then want to place into Word and then from Word you place into whatever blog engine you desire. Now I have to admit I have not actually tried these macros out but I can assure you that his code on his blog looks pretty darn good to me so I am willing to try it.

Find out more details on how Noah Coad places well formated code on his blog by going here.

http://blogs.msdn.com/noahc/archive/2006/07/06/658458.aspx

Later on I will attempt to have more in depth postings using this template. Hope this helps someone out there.

I recently came across Matt Hester's blog. Turns out he has some really great performance tips for improving Virtual PC. Some of these tips I would have never thought of had he not blogged about it.

The tips come in a three part series with the first part here.

http://blogs.technet.com/matthewms/archive/2005/09/09/410546.aspx

The second part of the three part series is here.

http://blogs.technet.com/matthewms/archive/2005/09/23/411478.aspx

The third part of the three part series is here.

http://blogs.technet.com/matthewms/archive/2005/10/07/412159.aspx

With those blog posts you should have Virtual PC running quite smoothly and fully optimized so as to not hang during a crucial presentation or developing the next big thing. Hope this helps.

I am sure many of you who read my blog are already aware of Microsoft releasing Virtual PC for free today. This is great news as it will allow me to beta test products I have been very wary to do so because I did not to ruin my production machine. However, I have also found out that VMWare has also released their VMWare Server for free today as well. This is beginning to look a lot like the browser wars of the mid 90's.

You can download the Microsoft Virtual PC here.

http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyId=6D58729D-DFA8-40BF-AFAF-20BCB7F01CD1&displaylang=en

You can find out more information about the VMWare Server release here.

http://www.vmware.com/news/releases/server.html

You can download VMWare server here.

http://www.vmware.com/products/server/

What does this mean to you and me? A whole lot as the cost of hardware is relatively cheap and now you can fully use all your resources of each server. I know of several very large companies that run their production web servers on VMWare servers, I am not going to tell you who as that could be a potential security breach for them. However though this does tell you the robustness of these products.

Have you ever wondered how to integrate the LLBGenPro with ASP.Net 2.0? Do you need an easy to use walkthrough that demonstrates how to do just that? Well you are now in luck as Frank Bouma, the inventor of LLBGen Pro, has done exactly that.

You can find details here.

Now what would be cool is the Atlas functionality can be integrated into these examples so as to really demonstrate a powerful web application example. Just a thought. I am sure someone is working on such a thing right now.

Even though the Atlas toolkit is still in CTP, that is beta for the rest of us, there is a Automation Test Harness released to make testing your web applications just that much easier.

You can download the Atlas Toolkit here.

You can out how to test the toolkit thorugh Shawn Burke's Blog here.

And finally you can visit the Codeplex Atlas Control Toolkit page here.

I am really looking forward to the enhanced functionality provided by the atlas framework. Personally I have always felt that web applications have been lacking. This framework solves the problem.