Johnny Halife’s Blog

As Matías posted on his blog, we were working on the Objective Domain Sessions for the 70-503 examn (Technical Specialist - WCF 3.5). The activity was held by the Microsoft Learning Team leaded by Howard Dierking. He explained us the refactoring of the Examination Stack, which IMHO it’s more reallistic rather than old-fashioned MCAD.net and those things.

How does it feel?

It felt great, was another kind of experience, was not developing, was not doing architecture, was not giving a conference, was something completly different from any experience I had in the past. It was a brainstorming about which are the right things to test candidates on WCF, was hiring oriented, each desicion was made thinking on the profile and the posibilities that this examn could bring to the candidate.

First, I’ll keep saying thanks to our team, the Southworks Team, who took as to be SMEs on WCF. Yes, that’s my first feeling, I feel that I’m on the right bus, that wasn’t me who was there, was the team. The team spoke thru us, but the knowledge and the experience using WCF was shared with them, so If Matías or Johny weren’t there probably another southy would take that position and the quality would be the same.

Second, I’m proud to be part of chaning things that I didn’t like from the past. A couple of years ago I was taking the courses of MCAD.net (Fwk v1.1) and I realized that the piece of paper that says MCAD.NET didn’t say what I really was. So now MS Learning is chaging the way that they develop the examns from scratch. The have choosen SMEs (Subject Matters Experts from the field) to say what should be in there. Cause we, the people on the field, will be the consumers of the resources made by them (MS Learning). So it’s a nice a approach to ask the buyer what he is going to buy.

Third, nothing except thanks to Microsoft Learning people, they were excellent hosters and also they conducted us thru the whole process to make it painless (since we’re not accostumed to do things like this).

Ok, that’s it from my side, I spent a week at Redmond, now back at home.

I’ll be wating to see how does the examn looks like…

thanks,
~johnny