Blogging about SharePoint

Over the last few weeks, I’ve studied for, taken, and passed 70-667 and 70-668, earning myself the MCTS for SharePoint 2010 Configuration and the MCITP for SharePoint 2010 Administration.

I thought I share some information on how I studied for 70-667.  These are the resources I used:

• MCTS Microsoft SharePoint 2010 Configuration Study Guide: Exam 70-667 by James Pyles
  • This was my primary study tool. As of this writing, there are no other study books available.  James Pyles’s book is good, but not perfect. It was very obviously written against the beta of SharePoint 2010, so there are references to things like the Geneva Framework which is now Windows Identity Foundation.  The errata page for the book is at http://www.sybex.com/WileyCDA/SybexTitle/MCTS-Microsoft-SharePoint-2010-Configuration-Study-Guide-Exam-70-667.productCd-0470627018,navId-290589,pageCd-errata.html.  I’m overdue to submit more errata.
    • Other study books that you may want to wait for, based on knowing their authors, are:

      MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-667): Configuring Microsoft SharePoint 2010 (Training Kits) by Dan Holme and others

      SharePoint 2010 Developer's Certification: Certification Toolkit for Exams 70-573 and 70-576 by Coskun C. and Darrin Bishop and others. For the Dev exams, not the Admin exams.

      Kris Wagner is also writing another certification book, but I don’t see it listed on Amazon yet.

  • The book includes a practice exam and flashcards via a Flash application.
    • The neat thing is that the flashcard data is all in an XML file, so I wrote a PowerShell script to read the questions and answers, and generate image files that I can flip through on my Zune.  The POSH script to do that is below.
    • The fact the book includes a practice exam is very valuable because neither Transcender, SelfTestSoftware, nor MeasureUp had practice exams for this exam.  Beware of other vendors, as it is getting harder to tell if a site is considered a braindump site as defined by Microsoft.
• A SP2010 virtual machine, where I could review Central Admin and the SharePoint POSH cmdlets. For the SP POSH Cmdlets, “get-help –examples” is your friend.
• Todd Klindt’s “netcast” podcast.  I’m not sure how much this helped me with the exam, but in every episode, I  always came away with something I could apply to real life SharePoint admin’ing.  That, and also that one should never play Kinect Volleyball under a ceiling fan…. Either way, it was a way to further immerse myself in SP Admin concepts even when I could listen but couldn’t read (e.g. when I was driving to work).
• Todd Klindt’s SP 2010 Admin book.  A number of other bloggers out there have recommended it for the exam.  I didn’t use it all that much, and was disappointed to not find any mention of performance counters in the monitoring section (Chapter 15), but I do otherwise think it’s a good book.

And now for the POSH script:

I wrote this so I could study on the go.  The concept works for any portable media player that lets you easily navigate from one picture to another in a folder of pictures.

Note that if you copy this code into a .ps1 file and run the file (assuming you have the XML file) in the right place, and you have to get the XML file from the CD in James’s book, then the code will execute.

The dimensions of 480x272 were chosen because that’s the dimensions of the Zune HD screen.  Feel free to modify that for your device.

Note that I name the images so that they sort by name correctly, which is why I use Q and S for Question and Solution instead of Q and A for Question and Answer.

You could also use this to make flashcards for almost any topic, for example sight word cards for a young child learning to read.

$questioncolor = [System.Drawing.Color]::White
$answercolor =  [System.Drawing.Color]::LawnGreen
$outdir = "C:\Users\michaelbl\Documents\profdev\MSCerts\2010\70-667\Flashcards\Flashcards4Zune\"

function global:make-card($color,$text, $outfilename)
{
$bmp = new-object System.Drawing.Bitmap(480,272)
$graphics = [System.Drawing.Graphics]::FromImage($bmp)
$font = New-Object System.Drawing.Font("Calibri", 16)
$brush = New-Object System.Drawing.SolidBrush($color)
$rectangle = New-Object System.Drawing.RectangleF(5,5,475,267)
$graphics.DrawString($text, $font, $brush,$rectangle)
$bmp.save($outfilename+".jpg", [System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat]::Jpeg)
$bmp.Dispose()
}

$datafile = [xml](Get-Content ..\data\flashcards.xml)
$datafile.section.question | foreach {
   
    $qid = $_.id
    write-host "Question No." $qid
    if ([int]$qid -lt 10) {$cardnum = "00" + $qid}
     else {
        if ([int]$qid -lt 100) {$cardnum = "0" + $qid} else {$cardnum = $qid}
        }
    #write-host $cardnum
    $outfile = $outdir + "card"+$cardnum+"q"
    #write-host $outfile
    $qtext = "Q"+$cardnum+".  "+$_.qtext.InnerText
    make-card $questioncolor $qtext $outfile
    $outfile = $outdir + "card"+$cardnum+"s"
    make-card $answercolor $_.answer.InnerText $outfile
}
dir