I was cleaning out the usual desk clutter the other day and found a voucher for a free Microsoft certification exam that was given to me from TechEd 2005! It was still in date, well it was going to expire at the end of the month, so I thought I’d book it for late January.
[Tues lunch time]
Prometric: "When do you want to book it for?"
Me: "Can I book it for late Jan?"
P: "let me see…you can have Thur or Fri?"
Me: "next week?"
P: "no this week, Fri is this last day you can book before the voucher expires"
<gulp> that givens me 2 lunch times and 3 evenings to cram like I’ve never crammed before!
So armed with my 1000 page Janet and John do Application Development book I managed to pass my exam, oh hurray for me. But all that aside 70-536 was quite a good exam to revise for and the official Microsoft study guide was pretty good. Some of the topics that usually have very chocked and dusty explanations were dealt with very well. Code Access Security (CAS) and Symmetric/Asymmetric encryption I thought were done very well, although as with all these revision guides they do only scratch the surface. A couple of things about security that I thought were really well put were;
- Using a domain to host a 3rd party component isn’t that you’re worried the 3rd party component is full of nasty code, it is that you’re not sure how well security audited it is and that some attacker may find a vulnerability in it. A nice way of thinking about the security risk.
- Seemingly risk-free resources can cause problems. E.g. The Event Log has never seemed liked a huge security risk to me, sure you could fire lots of messages for a Denial of Service, maybe clear a log to cover your tracks but, perhaps even read the log. But the one that was pointed out to me by the book I thought was very under-hand. You could shut an important service down and then pretend that all is well by logging fake log messages…clever.
I suppose I should think about doing another exam…then again I do have to wash my hair and then there’s the tiles to grout, must complete the Workflow demo, and the…
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