Showing posts with label Certification. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Certification. Show all posts

Monday, 2 June 2014

Stored Procedure to Calculate Expressions

I was reading the section Character Functions in the Chapter 2 of the book Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012 and pretty soon I get bored of trying individually the various functions on strings available in T-SQL.

Then, I challenged myself to write a stored procedure (this is my first one) to evaluate an arithmetic expression with parenthesis and show the individual steps of the calculation. I wanted something generic but I added some restrictions to it after seeing how crazy is to implement a split function in T-SQL.


This is the stored procedure. I know, it is crazy and I am sure there are much better way of doing it. Remember that my goal was to just get confidence with the T-SQL functions on strings. Anyway, I am happy to receive feedback on it and see different way of implementing this behaviour.


This is the result of the execution.


It was fun :)



Wednesday, 28 May 2014

Preparing for Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012

Few months ago I joined Red Gate Software and I am having a lot of fun so far. We have a great team in SQL Compare and we are working hard to add support for SQL Server 2014.

I think that learning more about SQL Server is very important because a lot of Red Gate products are designed to make DBA and developers working with it in a very productive way.

This is why I decided to start the path toward becoming a MCSA on SQL Server. To be honest, as a developer, my goal is just learning more about SQL Server and not necessarily get certified. However I will use the certification materials as a clear path to increase my knowledge.

The first exam on the list is
[70-461] Querying Microsoft SQL Server 2012

I know SQL and I have studied database development and design at University. However I don't know much about SQL Server specific features and the incredible power that the platform can offer. 

In order to keep me motivated I will post on my blog all the things I found interesting during my learning.

The following is a list of all the resources I will use to prepare for this exam:

It's time to write SQL :)

Wednesday, 1 May 2013

I am officially a Microsoft C# Specialist

Yesterday, I passed the "Programming in C#" exam.

This makes me officially a Microsoft C# Specialist.







If you are a C# developer you should definitely try the exam!

The following are the resources that I used in order to prepare for it:

If you don't mind waiting, Microsoft is releasing an official book in July:

Good luck

Tuesday, 23 August 2011

Exam passed: “MCTS - Windows Applications Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4”

I am definitely not a guru of WPF but recently in my company I had to play with it a little bit and it was the right opportunity to prepare the certification.

The 15th of August 2011 I passed the certification exam:
“MCTS - Windows Applications Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4”.

This is how looks my certification logo at the moment:


For many people certifications are not important or required. However, I believe that setting goals and achieve them is very exciting. If you studied at the university like me, you know what means passing an exam. Well, that kind of emotion allow you to continue towards higher goals.
This time I want to achieve the professial level MCPD.

Before this, I have to pass other two MCTS level certifications:
  • MCTS: .NET Framework 4, Data Access
  • MCTS: .NET Framework 4, Service Communication Applications
Let's start :)

Before to finish, I want to underline some important aspects when you want to prepare a Microsoft certification:
  1. Don't use only the official preparation book because it contains a subset of the required arguments.
  2. Read carefully the section "Skills Measured" and check that you covered all the subjects
    1. In this case, for example, it was easy to unnote that the exam included the Task Parallel Library and Parallel LINQ
  3. Take practise tests on MeasureUp is a big help and you shouldn't understimate this
One thing that I liked is that, comparing to the last time I did an exam (two years ago), the complexity was higher. Questions were less trivial that asking what is the name of a certain method (useless questions). Questions were about concepts in order to test your deep knowledge of certain subjects. It seems clear the work that Microsoft is doing to make certifications more valuable.