MCP

As you may or may not be aware I am a big, big Microsoft fan. I love their software, So much so I have bought a nice .NET laptop bag.

Now, why bring this topic up?? Well I also love to get free stuff from Microsoft.

In an attempt to get free stuff from them, about a year back, I decided to try to get a "Microsoft Certified Professional" qualification. Since my university studies have been based heavily around databases what better way to achieve this than to qualify through doing the "Designing and Implementing Databases with Microsoft SQL Server 2000 Enterprise Edition" exam.

Well this has so far failed. I have been slack in learning for it, and have been putting it off while I’m at uni and while I’m doing stuff with oracle (There SQL syntaxes differ slightly, so I don’t want to get bogged down in the exam or doing uni work). Now next year, 2005 (permitting Microsoft don’t anger the software development gods and yet again hold back the release date of their software), a new version of SQL sever may be coming out and therefore maybe making the exam obsolescent.

So over the next couple of weeks I might get myself into gear and learn, yet again, for a MCP qualification. I've been saying I will do it for ages, and since I have some free time on my hands I figure I might as well do it.

So what do I get for free for doing this, unfortunately not much other than the fact that I can say I have got the qualification (until they discontinue the exam out and pull my qualification).

In the past, through various means I have received lots of fun stuff from Microsoft. This included posters, bunting, free copies of office, hats, calculators and more. It's amazing what they actually give away.

Anyhoo cheerio.