Patterns

Without sounding trite, as this topic is all over the software world currently, patterns can save you a lot of time. For years, I've tried to understand them, learn how to use them and just in general up my skills. This is proved difficult though, as the materials are very difficult to understand. Then, just a few weeks back I was at he Data and Object Factory site when I saw their new product the Design Pattern Framework. Now this is what I had been looking for.

Instead of theory and essays on the patterns, this is the PDF guide, Vision diagrams, and complete code samples illustrating how the patterns work! Including, much to my liking, a demo ecommerce asp.net web application utilizing the patterns. I've learned a ton in just a few days of using the product and begining to understand simple things like a singleton, an abstract factory or the strategy pattern.
Extremely clean code is what you get, and the confidence in what I do DOES help.

http://www.dofactory.com/Framework/Framework.aspx

Prometric Testing

Prometric has great teting facilities. I've been to a few, and the one downtown Chicago is very good and efficient. Their backoffice is not so much though. I completed my MCAD with the Web services exam in August, and Prometric has yet to properly publish my records to Microsoft. Be it, Microsoft is aware of this, and is trying to get Prometric to shape up. Here is the deal. Prometric this year decided to assign me a new MCP ID because I was new to them, even if I had an ID since 1997. So, when I take a test the transfer my records to this fake MCP account at Microsoft. I called them, and told them they had the wrong MCP ID and I would like to give them the correct one...this is where it gets good. After getting to their second tier global support they told me that it's Microsoft's responsibility to update my MCP id with them. Right! I'm sure Prometric has their system exposed with some API and Microsoft plays clean up for their poor IT operations every Sunday evening. Right. So, until them I won't have my new MCAD materials. I'm slighly afraid to being testing for the MCSD now.