Daily Archives: May 4, 2004

taking the 70-330 cert beta

Just Rambling

Well I took the 70-330 Beta security exam today. I was pretty poorly prepared with short notification of it’s availability (and this afternoon was the cut-off time to take the beta) with no ability to invent much time to focus on prepping. I had almost cancelled, but decided to bite the bullet, cram as much as I could and take it.

Horrors! It was hard and gruelling. I think I am a really bad test taker for one. I found myself often reading the convoluded twisty questions (this is not new to MS cert tests from all I have heard over the years) more than once since I had a hard time just focusing on them.

Being a beta this was a long test.

There was nothing in there that I was unfamiliar with but I think my broad understanding of concepts far exceeds my ability to memorize lots of complex syntax.

However, the time spent was not a bust. In my cramming effort, I touched on a lot of .net security stuff that I hadn’t worked with yet and found Keith Brown’s awesome book. I may not be able to code it blind, but I do think I know when I would use which piece of security and what to look for in the documentation to drill into enough to excecute my code and my ideas properly. This is a much greater value to me than the certification. Besides, my certain miserable failure will probably help lower the bar and make the final structure of the test a little easier.

This won’t however, stop me from taking some of the tests cold for 1/2 price at TechEd – the ones that are on things I do and use every day.

Kathleen Dollard on dotNET Rocks this Thursday night!

dotNET

New to blogging, but well-versed in programming!! Kathleen is a true VB and Code Generation expert, an MVP and you have likely seen her many many articles in Visual Studio Magazine.

She’s on dotNetRocks this Thursday night 10-12pm EST.

from Carl’s blog:

Rory and I will be talking with Kathleen Dollard about code generation, reflection, and other topics this Thursday night on .NET Rocks! Live at 10PM EST It is rumored that Don Kiely will stop by as well!  We’ll be giving away a copy of Microsoft Office Professional 2003 to a lucky listener, so come and hang out! Don’t forget to send us your Dumb Emails!

Keith Brown’s on line .NET Security book is even entertaining

dotNET

Security guru Keith Brown’s A .NET Developer’s Guide to Windows Security  is on line and I’m reading parts of it in my last minute cramming for the 70-330 beta exam. Ach – I have to leave in 1 1/2 hours!

Anyway, I love stuff like this:

From the chapter on Configuring Security for a COM(+) Client (item 53):

It’s a pity that I even have to write this piece, or that it needs to be as complicated as this, but the COM Interop team, while they are content to automate the call to CoInitializeEx for you, apparently don’t feel the same about helping you with security. In fact, in a simple console or Windows Forms application, for example, nobody in the framework bothers to call CoInitializeSecurity. Didn’t anyone on these teams read [PWS]? Arrrgh!

and further on

Here’s the fun part. The normal place where you should call CoInitializeSecurity is when your program first starts up, right after your main thread calls CoInitializeEx. But the .NET Framework takes care of calling CoInitializeEx for you. It does it lazily the first time you make a COM interop call. But by the time you’ve made a COM interop call, it’s already to late to call CoInitializeSecurity! Bah!