Microsoft has offered attractive certification programs for a long time, as a way of proving and ensuring your skills for certain technologies.

With the launch of Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET 2.0 framework Microsoft upgraded their certification structure for developers to make it more customizable for your actual job function. The number of required tests for reaching a certifications have grown while they have become easier to pass.

I have decided to pursue one of the tracks for getting a .NET 2.0 certification, to complete my knowledge of the .NET technology. A certification involves a big investment in time and also money, since the tracks span a wide and deep subject. To study the subject you are best off purchasing one of the available self-study books or taking any of the e-learning courses Microsoft is offering. Other options range from free MSDN-studying to intensive classroom training. Then we have the actual tests, which are not cheap either. My plan is to buy one of the self-study books, which I have good experience from after studying for one of the older Visual Studio 6/MFC certifications.

What is the purpose of certifying yourself? Well, as I mentioned above it is a great way of proving and/or ensuring your knowledge for yourself or others. Beside this obvious advantage, a certified professional will get additional benefits, like discount on various Microsoft products, access to some special content, invitations to conferences and some logos to use on web sites or business card.

Take a minute to remember the last project you completed alone. Can you remember the satisfaction of seeing the pieces fall into place to build a greater whole, to put the finishing touches and perhaps launch it publicly? This satisfaction, in its best moments, defines one of greatest feelings in life. It is the driving force for artists, hackers, bloggers, journalists, and anyone who lets their creativity be a central part of their day-to-day activities.

Creativity can be manifested in different ways for different people. The force of it is just as powerful though, no matter if it is being used to cook, do gardening, writing, drawing, composing music, or anything else. I am a software developer, and my choice of profession has a lot to do with getting an outlet for my desire to be creative. It is my firm belief that people gain happiness and satisfaction from nurturing and giving in to their creative impulses.

Society brings with it social pressures and expectations as well as stereotypes we are expected to fit into. These are stifling our creativity, and it is up to each and every one of us to find our own way. To find our own way is not an easy thing and we must constantly fight this war, in order not to fall back into stereotypical behavior and dissatisfaction. It is by leveraging our creativity that we can force this issue to our advantage. The war against stereotypical behavior must be fought on many fronts: professionally, as a family, in your relations with close ones, and of course in your dealings with yourself.

A personal example: Last year I decided that I wanted to start my own software development business. This decision stemmed from the fact that I had always had creative positions in my professional life until I emigrated from Sweden to Israel. Here in my new country I started to work in a position where my creative juices weren’t flowing like I was used to. I was more and more missing the development work I always had been doing in the corporate world. I decided that the best way for me to express my creativity by building software applications on my own time.

It is the first time I am creating a large software project on my own, including marketing and selling it. It is nothing short of amazing. Everyday I am learning something new and the fact that I am my own boss means that I can focus my creativity in the direction where I am feeling most productive that day. One day it means writing articles or blog entries, another day it means coding or web site building.

Going it alone in the software business is of course not a new phenomenon (small shareware shops were heard of decades ago), but there is a rather recent term for it: micro-ISV (Independent Software Vendor). It connotes to one or a few individuals who are building and selling software products. The term was coined by Eric Sink in an MSDN Magazine article, and it stuck in the industry. Today, there are books, active forums, podcasts and web sites dedicated to help out the budding or already blossoming micro-ISV entrepreneur. These micro-ISV and shareware people who are going it alone have all made a proactive choice about using their creativity daily.

I think there is a reason we are seeing a entrepreneurial boom in the software industry today. The growth and acceptance of e-commerce along with more powerful and affordable Rapid Application Development tools (Visual Studio Express comes to mind), makes it much easier for the single software developer to make a living today. It’s a beautiful world where creativity can pay the bills!

Yes folks, we have a world premiere, the first sample of a FeedJournal issue is available for your viewing pleasure! Let me remind you that the purpose of the FeedJournal project is to generate a PDF newspaper based on RSS feeds, intended for printing. The PDF file is available for download here. In order to open it you will need Adobe Reader or Foxit Reader.

The content spans a selection of last week’s blog entries from the Made In Express Contest finalists. I chose these feeds, not because I want to plug the contest, but because I want to avoid breeching copyright law for republishing other blogs’ articles.

So what can you see in this sample issue? The following settings are in use: A4 paper size (a European standard), 4 columns, 0 points line spacing, 8 points column spacing, 30 points page margin and 10 points margin between headline and article text. Furthermore, the headline is Times New Roman (22 pt bold), article text is Times New Roman (8pt), publishing date is Lucida Console (5pt) and news source is Arial (9pt italic). All of these settings, and others, can be customized from the application’s Options dialog.

But there are also things that you cannot see in the sample. Like for example images. Beside the masthead (newspaper lingo for the first page logo), there are no images. Future versions of FeedJournal will include support for images contained in blog entries. Another thing not visible in the sample issue is the already implemented support for long articles to jump between pages if they do not fit. The reason is simply that there weren’t any long articles available in the selected time span.

And let me finally take the opportunity to congratulate my fellow finalists for getting published in the newspaper! ;-)

I would appreciate any feedback regarding the sample issue, don’t hesitate to contact me by using blog comments or e-mail me at contact@feedjournal.com.

Time, quality, resources and scope. Those are the four variables in software project management. As the deadline closes in I only have the luxury to change scope. Sure, there are more features I planned to get into this version, but the scope will be cut in order to make the release stable and have a timely delivery. Time is a rare resource for me these days with being a new father , having a full-time job, following the latest news about the regional conflict, and blogging/developing FeedJournal . Despite that, I am proud of what I have accomplished so far with my project in Visual C# 2005 Express Edition.

One week remains until release, and the time has come for Code Freeze: no more new features. Until August 6th I will work on finalizing documentation, web site, and of course testing.

FeedJournal will become a commercial project in version 2.0. Until then the fully functional version 1.0 will be the one submitted for the Made In Express Contest under a shared source license. That basically means that the source is available but there are no rights to use this source code in your own projects. I plan to add plenty of cool features before a commercial release plus some optimizations under the hood. I would like to thank everyone who contacted me with feature requests or comments. What you should expect to see in future versions are:

• Sections
• Layout templates
• Images
• Browser integration for publishing a selected web page in the next issue
• PDF import (nice for those online crossword puzzles and Sudokus)
• Advanced article scoring using user-defined keywords and extended RSS tags
• Scheduled publishing and printing
• HTTP authentication and cookie support
• Improved throttling support and adhering to servers’ TTL setting

There are also some ideas I had envisioned early on in the project, prior to starting implementation, that have been moved to the recycle bin. Nothing strange with this, it is a normal reality check once you get down to the fine points of how things are supposed to work. For example, I had planned to rank articles according to web popularity (Technorati, Digg, delicious, Google, Yahoo, etc.). After much research of the various service APIs it is clear to me that this is simply not possible. Having x articles would mean sending x web requests to the various services. Until they support a technique for bundling together multiple requests into one, this feature will not be a part of FeedJournal.

In the meantime, I am looking for serious beta testers for future FeedJournal versions who will be rewarded for constructive feedback and testing.