I’ve just completed a 3 day training on the Management of Software Projects using Microsoft Solutions Framework and Visual Studio Team System.

This training (or seminar) was organized by Microsoft Romania and it was intended for software pros from the area of Cluj-Napoca. Myself, along with a couple of other Microsoft Student-Partners, were lucky enough to receive an invitation.

The trainer was Adi Stoian from TechReady. I’ve previously met Adi last November at the TechEd Developers Conference in Barcelona.

I was really looking forward to see him in action because last spring he trained around a dozen CS students along with my MSP colegue, Mihai Hudea in an activity of the MS Center in the Technical University of Cluj-Napoca. It was a great succes!

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For some time now I wanted to polish my programming skills, especially in .NET, and the best way for that was to actually work with the experts. There are several ways to achieve this, i.e. learning from people in production: participate in training, getting an internships in a good company or getting hired in a good company.

My wish became reality in early March when I learned about a .NET 2.0/3.0 training organized by one of the best software companies in Cluj-Napoca, ISDC. I submitted my resume and few days after I was scheduled for a test. All I knew about the test was that it was about .NET, C#. I thought it would probably an easy test, combining basic .NET stuff with OOP. That thought changed 2 minutes after I started the test: the vast majority of questions were strictly about .NET 2.0 features. Although I moved to Visual Studio 2005 (an .NET 2.0) soon after it was RTM (fall 2005), I didn’t actually study like I did when I got my MCP Certification on WinForms.NET 1.1.

With every new question, I was becoming more disappointed of myself. The result page almost made me K.O. I couldn’t believe that I scored so low. A couple of minutes later, someone came and assured me that my score was pretty OK and told me that I will be notified if I qualified.

Of course i was sure that would not happen. That same evening I started looking for good books on Amazon and asking recommendations from my friends. I wanted to learn.

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