I took Beta exam no 70-448 last July, because I was curious how’s difficult it is. It is a Business Intelligence exam, a foundation for MCITP for SQL 2008 BI. I’ve touched SQL 2008 since it’s CTP 5 release so I’m quite familiar with the stuff.

I sat almost 3 hours in the testing room, clicked the finish button to end the exam. There was no on the spot scoring for beta. So I did not really know if I passed or fail. But I felt that I pass even with no flying marks. After more than 4 months, I just received email from MS learning. They said that I passed the Beta. Wow, It seems magic to me.

From: Microsoft Certified Professional Programs
Sent: Thursday, October 09, 2008 11:22 AM
To: Muhammad Choirul Amri
Subject: Congratulations on Your Microsoft Certification! Access Your Benefits
Congratulations on earning your Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist: SQL Server 2008, Business Intelligence Development and Maintenance certification! We hope you enjoy the benefits of your certification and of membership in the Microsoft Certified Professional community.

In fact, my knowledge on SQL 2005 helped a lot to clear the exam. I did not do special preparation for it. It was a free offer, so nothing to loose at my side. I really relied on my prior knowledge on SQL 05, play around with SQL 08 and of course my real world experience in the past. This is also a prove that at least I know the stuff better. I was not cramming the book and practice test to shot the test.

I logged in to my MCP transcript, and MCTS SQL 2008 BI Charter member is already under my belt. Yes, I’m the charter member.

I joined the rank of first 200 people who cleared this paper. I can’t wait to receive the welcome kit. Hopefully there will be something special for Charter Member

Now I challenge my friend Kasim and Zeddy. If you dare to fail, try the beta exam.

Posted by mca | 3 Comments »

When I was installing my machine with vista, I installed Windows Live Writer as well. I was quite surprise when started a blog post, and It asked me to update to release version. Yes, the live writer that I had is beta, and now this guy was released already. And the best of all, it’s still free and hopefully forever free :).

Live writer makes my blogging even easier. I can attach and resize the picture, and do rich formatting directly without using additional plug in.

A few criticism for this release are:

• The wizard only shows Sharepoint and Livespace blog as default blogging connection. If I use Wordpress than I have to choose "other" and proceed to Wordpress option after that. Even though the wizard is smart enough to find my setting, but put the mainstream Wordpress under "other" is sound too marketing instead of technical. But this writer is very smart to detect the Wordpress and Blogspot setting anyway.
• There are a lot of mainstream .Net based blogging engine such as Community Server, BlogEngine.Net, and Dasblog. But all of them never mentioned in the wizard, even under "other" category. Of course I can do manual configuration as long as I know the xmlrpc address of each blogs. But leaving the main blogging player in .Net community is a tragic marketing decision ;). Maybe Rob Howard need to approach the Live product group to include Community Server under the wizard.

There are some additional small application that come together with this release. They are Live Mail, Live Photo Gallery, Live Messenger, and Live one care. The Live Mail is better comparing with Windows Mail or Outlook Express. But the Live Photo Gallery is a bit disappointed, I even couldn’t figure out how to create a photo tag in an easy manner. Picasa from google is still better.

Posted by mca | 2 Comments »

My lovely choirulamri.or.id was expired on last December 2007. I didn’t have a chance to renew this Indonesian second level domain, because I’m working at Singapore now. The domain management system is not fully automated like other international domain provider, so renewal process was a bit headache for me. The problem became worst because the IDNIC management was handed over by other body named PANDI. Maybe I was to lazy to dig their FAQ or migration guide, but I was screwed up in the end.

I decided to pick choirulamri.org as a quick replacement. Hopefully I will have a chance to renew my lovely or.id. I’m going to go to Jakarta next month for a company trip, and I hope I can renew it. I has been a long time I never wrote a blog post because of this problem. Now I’m starting again

for anybody who has made link to my RSS feed, please updated accordingly.

Posted by mca | No Comments »

Windows Live Writer WLW) just headed it’s Beta 2 phase. It supports most of the existing blogging engines. Just choose “other blogging service” in the wizard and it will automatically detect all of our cross posting protocol that is installed in our blog.

It’s a pretty easy configuration for end user, not like w.bloggar that need a little knowledge about absolute URL and XML-RPC location before doing a blog post. Here is the automatic configuration in action:

I’m doing this post from WLW, and seems works fine. Say good bye to Word 2007 blog post feature. This tool is better than the one in MS Word 2007. It seems MS try to put WLW as a rich blog editing platform. Best of all, it’s free. And hopefully will forever free :). Grab it from Windows Live Writer Beta download page.

Posted by mca | 11 Comments »

Posted by mca | 7 Comments »