As usual, I procastinated this news .

On October 10th, 2009, I passed the Microsoft 70-562 exam towards the MCTS certification. I am now officially Microsoft Certified on ASP.NET 3.5. I wanted to share a bit about my testing experience.

I had bought the training kit for Microsoft, "MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit Exam 70-562" and read it for the most part. The book was a good help, but if you have been developing applications for ASP.NET for some time, like me, you will find yourself right at home. However, I felt there were some topics shallowed covered and I needed more than that. After googling it a bit, I read some comments from other developers expressing the same insight, the book was not enough to pass the test. That's when I invested a bit more on a practice test from measure up and I realized I was on the right path. Some topics covered on the practice test were barely mentioned on the Training Kit, mostly WCF services, client AJAX development which were subjects I felt I needed some review. I don't know why Microsoft did it this way; I can say that thanks to the practice test and not to the Training Kit I passed the test.

After a month of preparation using both sources, I can certainly say that I have shapened my skills at work and those skills have been in use for current and newer endeavors.

All in all, I am very happy with the result, and even thought I know for the fact that for many this is not that valuable, for me it represents a milestone for all other future goals ahead.

Yes, I know. I have not written anything in a whileeeee! After I got married and graduated from school, have not had much time for myself.

But today at work, after an hour of debugging an ASP.NET application and trying to find an answer why the GridViewRow.RowState property was acting wierd, I learned something new and I wanted to share it. I learned that the RowState property is actually checking the value using bit logic. I had not used bitwise operator since school and found interesting that I finally find an use for it. 

My problem was that I wanted to modify all the rows but the ones marked as RowState.DataControlRowState.Edit in the RowDataBoud event and at first I was doing it wrong:

 If e.Row.RowType = DataControlRowType.DataRow And (e.Row.RowState <> DataControlRowState.Edit) Then ...

It looked fine to me, but it didn't work.  An that's how I discovered I had to use bit logic because that is how the RowState property stores its values. The correct way to do this is:

 If e.Row.RowType = DataControlRowType.DataRow And ((e.Row.RowState And DataControlRowState.Edit) <> DataControlRowState.Edit) Then ...

By using the AND bitwise operator you are actually checking is the value is in the "bucket" (this term is well explained in the link I provide below) and then comparing the bit value. It's pretty easy once you understand the concept. And the concept was well explained in this article.

http://weblogs.asp.net/alessandro/archive/2007/10/02/one-bit-masks-for-access-control-setting-permissions-in-your-asp-net-applications.aspx

Hope it helps somebody.