Completed the certification, ready for the next round

A while back, when I started working for Fundator, I started a certification run. The purpose of this was mainly to document my current knowledge and at the same time broaden the knowledge area a bit.

I have now completed this, by taking 6 MS exams, and I do currently have the following MS certifications:

Microsoft Certified Professional Developer
  Enterprise Application Developer

Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist
  .Net Framework 2.0: Web Applications
  .Net Framework 2.0: Distributed Applications
  .Net Framework 2.0: Windows Applications
  SQL Server 2005

As you of course will notice, these certifications are already a bit outdated. The hot new stuff now is .Net 3.5, WPF and those certifications. I have also noticed that MS have just introduced their new Master series of certifications.

However, the area of knowledge needed for the new MS certifications is mostly extensions of these certifications, so I do absolutely think that these certifications will be good to have.

Now it will soon be summer holyday. For now I will stay low and relax, but after the summer I'll probably continue my certification run, but then it will be a lot more learning of new stuff...

Early prototyping

It haven’t been a lot of coding for me lately. 

I’m currently working on extending an existing product with a new area of functionality. This involves a lot of studying and learning new stuff.

Some of the most exiting parts of this process is to notice how you gain more knowledge and understanding about the problem area as you go ahead and learn new stuff. I have been through this process several time before, but this time is a bit different as we are using some more time on the learning process. We are working in a broader area and there is no expert or customer that has full knowledge of the problem area.

The task at hand is to carve the product into shape, figure out what it should do and how it should do it. Kind of creating a product vision.

As a part of this I have done some very early prototyping. Earlier, when working with more concrete solutions, I have found that using Visual Studio in combination with bitmaps have worked relatively well. 

In this project that did not work at all. The outcome felt "to concrete", it did not leave enough room for the next phase and it quickly become too close to a real solution while at the same time being difficult to use.

Based on that experience and some more testing I’m currently using several tools to create GUI prototyping.
- I’m using paper/drawing to test out initial ideas and thoughts
- I’m using excel/word to test out special situations and presentation
- I’m using paint to steel small pictures/figures/symbols and ideas from other products
- I’m using power point to put together all elements, as well as adding simple animations to show transitions and illustrate the most important navigations

I’m sure that there is a lot of other GUI prototyping tools out there. However, to practically solve raising issue, I have found this method, using simple and available tools to work quite well as a way of sharing ideas and possible solutions with others.