MCP Exam and Tech.Ed Day 1

Well thank God for that - I passed.  I am now officially an MCP (well when Microsoft sends out my official certification I will be).

The exam was a little more difficult than I thought it would be.  There were a lot of questions on areas that I wasn't too knowledgable about because I tend to use other methods to solve those problems (case in point the in-depth features of DataSets).  I was actually quite worried at around question 7 because I hadn't had one that I was 100% sure I got right yet.  Revisiting them all and looking a bit closer helped a lot though.  I ended up getting a score of 829 (pass mark is 700), so I've gotta be happy with that.

A couple of interesting sessions at Tech.Ed today, most notably a keynote from a Microsoft employee who is a social anthropologist (I can't remember her name and I can't find it on the Tech.Ed site).  It seems that Microsoft is actually realising that their customers are humans who might not necessarily be particularly good at using and setting up computers...  When this speaker joined the company she found that (in her words) about 99.9% of Beta testers for Windows were techies.  Obviously the statistics they'd gathered on how easy things were were slightly inaccurate.

Anyway, got more architecture sessions to go to in a minute, so I'll leave it for now.  Internet connectivity here is very good (even for those of us like myself who didn't bring laptops), so I might be blogging a bit in the spaces between sessions.  If you care, keep an eye out.

Damo