Failed the Turing Test

Tuesday, June 17, 2014

Microsoft 70-486: Design and implement the Azure role life cycle

Exam Objectives

Identify and implement Start, Run, and Stop events; identify startup tasks (IIS configuration [app pool], registry configuration, third-party tools)

Quick Overview of Training Materials

Exam Ref 70-486: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications - Objective 1.3
MSDN - Channel 9 Cloud Services Tutorial
MSDN - Channel 9 Windows Azure Jump Start (03): Windows Azure Lifecycle, Part 1, Part 2

MSDN - Use AppCmd.exe to Configure IIS at Startup
MSDN - Windows Azure Start-up Tasks Part 1, Part 2
MSDN - Run Startup Tasks in Azure, Best Practices
MSDN - RoleEntryPoint Methods
MSDN - The Right Way to Handle Azure OnStop Events
MSDN - Azure Cloud Service Tutorial

Microsoft 70-486: Design a distributed application

Exam Objectives

Design a hybrid application (on-premises versus off-premises, including Azure), plan for session management in a distributed environment, plan web farms, **integrate web services

Quick Overview of Training Materials

Exam Ref 70-486: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications - Objective 1.2
Programming ASP.NET MVC 4 (OReilly) - Chapters 7 (Web API), 2 (State mgmt)
How to add Web API to existing MVC 4 project
MSDN - WCF Services and ASP.NET

Web API Study: The Benefits of APIs in the App Economy
Web API Design : Crafting Interfaces that Developers Love
MSDN - .NET On-Premises/Cloud Hybrid Application Using Service Bus Relay

MSDN - Getting Started with the Azure Tools for Visual Studio

MSDN - ASP.NET State Management Overview

MSDN - ASP.NET Session State Overview, Session-State Modes
MSDN - Technet - About Server Farms, Server Affinity Page
Make an ASP.NET MVC application Web Farm Ready
Out-of-Process Caching in ASP.NET

MSDN - Azure Cache

MSDN - Differences between On-Premises AppFabric 1.1 Caching and Azure Managed Cache Service

Comparing ASP.NET MVC tutorials: OdeToFood, Nerddinner, and MVC Music Store

I worked through three ASP.NET MVC tutorials: NerdDinner, OdeToFood, and MVC Music Store. All had their pro's and con's, and I definitely learned much from them. The pluralsight tutorial OdeToFood was, far and away, the best put together tutorial of the bunch, and if you had to pick one, that would be the one to do. NerdDinner wasn't bad but is showing it's age as it was developed using MVC2 (though I thought I saw something about updates...). The MVC Music Store tutorial also had a lot of interesting stuff but I would have to consider it the weakest of these three tutorials.

Microsoft 70-486: Plan the application layers

Exam Objectives

Plan data access; plan for separation of concerns; appropriate use of models, views, and controllers; choose between client-side and server side processing; design for scalability

Quick Overview of Training Materials

Exam Ref 70-486: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications - Objective 1.1
Programming ASP.NET MVC 4 (OReilly) - Chapters 5, 8

MSDN - ASP.NET Data Access Options

ASP.NET MVC 4 Models and Data Access

MSDN - Demystifying Entity Framework Strategies: Model Creation Workflow

MSDN - Entity Framework (EF) Documentation
MSDN - Guiding Principles For Your ASP.NET MVC Applications
Implementing the Repository and Unit of Work Patterns in an ASP.NET MVC Application
MSDN - The Unit of Work Pattern and Persistance Ignorance
What is ASP.NET MVC? 80 minute technical video for developers, building NerdDinner
MSDN - Action Filters in ASP.NET MVC
Pros/cons between emphasizing client-side or server-side processing
Performance and scalability techniques 101
Looking back: How I'd build a large-scale web app today versus how I did it 10 years ago

Upgraded Lenovo Ideapad Z570 to 16GB Ram

According to Lenovo the Z570 only supports up to 8GB, but after doing a little research I found multiple instances of folks upgrading to 16GB, so I took a leap of faith and tried it with mine. Success! (How-to video on YouTube helped with installation)

I had a bit of a hard time finding a US supplier for the ram sticks. Crucial's helper application stuck with the Lenovo documentation and would only recommend up to 8GB, but this is the EXACT kit that I used:

Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3 1333 MT/s (PC3-10600) CL9 SODIMM 204-Pin 1.35V/1.5V Notebook Memory Modules CT2CP102464BF1339

[UPDATE 12/28/2017]
Someone pointed out in the comments that this particular model is no longer available (not surprising given the age of this post). Amazon recommends another kit, CT2KIT102464BF160B, which has the same specs as the memory currently recommended by Crucial for the z570. I can't say from personal experience how well this memory would perform in practice, but it seems like a safe substitute:

Crucial 16GB Kit (8GBx2) DDR3/DDR3L 1600 MT/S (PC3-12800) Unbuffered SODIMM 204-Pin Memory - CT2KIT102464BF160B
[END UPDATE]

This Lenovo forum had several users also state that they could use 16GB, and was a key factor in my decision to make the leap.

Here is a screenshot of System Monitor (I'm running Fedora on this machine). I have 6GB allocated to a Win7 VirtualBox VM, which is why the usage is so high.

Google GovDevChallenge Hackathon

Participated in my first ever Hackathon this weekend (5/17/2014), what an experience that was! The idea behind this Hackathon was to give hackers a chance to make government more efficient and transparent. Colorado and Wyoming worked with Google and Galvanize down in Denver to put the event on, and I went down with four other developers from ETS to compete. We didn't win but we learned a lot and booked some serious overtime haha.

MVA Course: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications Jump Start (Modules 7 & 8)

Covered deploying to Azure, SignalR, and new features in Visual Studio 2013.

MVA Course: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications Jump Start (Modules 5 & 6)

Covered JavaScript and Web services in these two modules.

MVA Course: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications Jump Start (Modules 3 & 4)

Cover writing controllers and views. Visual Studio has a lot of tools to help make this very easy. With some practice should be possible to deploy applications very fast with scaffolding and templates and such.

MVA Course: Developing ASP.NET MVC 4 Web Applications Jump Start (Modules 1 & 2)

Basic overview and ASP.NET MVC, with an emphasis on quickly getting into the code. First couple modules were relatively short (30-45 minutes) and easy to follow.

SICP - Storage Allocation and Garbage Collection

Last lecture in the series, talk about garbage collection. Apparently LISP uses a mark and sweep algorithm. Or maybe a related algorithm developed by Minsky in the sixties. Toward the end of the lecture Sussman talks about the halting theorem, basically proving that there is not procedure that can generally check whether or not a given procedure is safe to run. Interesting stuff.

SICP - Register Machines

In this lecture Sussman covers register machines, and we walk through the operation of a couple of very simple programs. We look at an embedded register machine language.

SICP - Compilation

Shorter lecture on the way a compiler for LISP might function.

SICP - Explicit-control Evaluator

This lecture looks at implementing the LISP meta-circular evaluator as a register machine. Very interesting to see the process actually play itself out and how this looks to the hardware.

SICP - Logic Programming Part 2

In this lecture we took a high level view at implementation, though we didn't actually write the pattern matching or any other LISP code, which I'll admit was dissappointing. I guess if I want to try this out I'll have to read the appropriate section in the book.

SICP - Logic Programming Part 1

In this lecture we start looking at a Logical Programming language that differs quite a lot from the way we have been programming thus far. This lecture is about looking at the language and seeing how it is used, the next lecture will actually implement the language.

Manage Test Execution

These modules mostly covered running tests and managing work items.

MVA Course: Software Testing with Visual Studio 2012 Jump Start (Modules 3a & 3b)

Just getting back into this course after focusing on the 70-480 test. Steve and Anthony cover creating test steps for a test case, creating action recordings, and using parameters. The parameters are pretty cool since they make it simple to execute multiple test runs using different data. The shared steps were also interesting, seems they would make tests much more maintainable.