I have finally decided to do my last upgrade exam to be an Enterprise Application Developer. For each exam passed when they were in beta, Person Vue was handing me a free exam to take before the end of February. So, why not do it, I have already studied for it last year and the experience of this year can just help. I’m pretty sure I will pass.

http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcp/mcpd/entapp/default.mspx

I’m looking right now for a way to remove dependency from my application and the solution seems to be the IoC pattern(Inversion Of Control) now know as dependency injection. A quick search in Google lead me to the Inversion of Control Containers and the Dependency Injection pattern article by Martin Fowler.

So in this article I have the choice of using the Dependency Injection pattern and use a framework like Spring, Avalon or the container called PicoContainer, or use the Service Locator pattern that use no other framework. A good argument is that with dependency injection, testing is much easier. There is no easy solution but probably give the Spring framework a try since it have other nice feature.

It’s done. I am right now a member of the IEEE Computer Society. I’m happy with it since I have access to some magazines, 2 email aliases and some decent courses. The problem is that it’s not cheap. More than 100$ but for each additional topics or area other than computer (ex: embedded systems), there is an additional fee. I was also expecting more conference in my region, I see none for a long time.

SP 1 Update : I think I will abandon all hope soon. The uninstall process does not see the Visual Studio 2005 setup as the one it need so it failed. I tried it twice with no successfully result. The next step is the uninstall and re-install of the IDE.

Wednesday, January 03, 2007

If you are looking for a nice little hobby, try TopCoder! Well, It’s not really an easy hobby, but it can be very rewarding. I am right now looking for a nice opportunity to participate it those competition, but I heard it’s very hard.