Taking a little break right now, got a bit of a burn out, lack of sleep might have something to do with it :)

The ASP.NET MVC project I had in mind will have to wait a little bit, with a bit of luck it gives me time to find a good graphical designer as well, they seem so rare to find. If you know a good designer, please comment!

What I'm going to do however, is study for a Microsoft Certificate.

Normally I'm not into degrees, when I graduated I saw people graduate with the same degree as me, who could barely write HTML or C#, at which point I placed no value in the degree people have. I rather judge people on what they say and do, which is also the reason I never really bothered with certificates.

But even as a developer, you can't be blind to the world, certificates matter for non-developers. I admit it's a nice addition to a resume and leverage when it comes to negotiating your salary, however I'm starting to see some value in the certificate as well.

When you properly prepare for an exam, without cheating and learning all questions by heart, it's actually a good form of self-education. Even when you don't take the exam in the end, the stuff you pick up while learning the required matter for an exam is valuable.

All these little hidden things you learn about the .NET Framework help to broaden your background knowledge, tiny things which you'd never encounter normally. It helps you make you aware of all the features .NET offers you, and if it only helps you do one thing better, it still helped.

I could disappear for some weeks now to study and not write anything, but that's not me.

Instead, I've added a section to my wiki reserved for note taking and research on the exam itself.

It's not a tutorial, but I belief it does contain some nice "wow, that's cool"-things.

Going to keep you updated whenever I finish a chapter, with a small summary of the things I think are cool.

Today I'm going to tell you a little story about me. I think of myself as your typical description of a geek.

Passionate about all things technological, eager to find out how the inner details work together, a movie and music lover, and spending too much time behind a computer.

Having all those feats, over the course of twenty years, result in getting out of touch with the what interests the large part of the population.

I don't care about soccer, drinking, going out or making a complete fool out of myself. I can talk for hours about some architecture however, or about techy pranks.

But you know what? My surroundings don't have a clue what I'm talking about, usually ending up in me not bothering anymore. Same for taste of humor, I love the dry British kind, and everyone I know hates it.

This isn't some sort of self-pity post however. I'm fine with making conversation, but most of the time it's forced, and I constantly have to fight the analytical part of my mind to not interfere and kill the conversation.

That being said, I'd like to meet some other geeks from around the world to have a chat with, the international developer community.

Do you sometimes have the same feelings? Would you like to meet someone new? Talk about some random IT thing, or just about your life to a fellow geek?

Contact me! Tell me something about you, where are you from, how old are you, what do you do, some story. Please? :)


Writing all these articles is fun, but having dialogues is a lot more stimulating.

I hope to hear from you! :)


(Yeah, non-geeks can mail too, if you have some interest in IT or aren't bored by someone talking about it :))

Let me start by introducing myself on this fresh blog..

My name is David Cumps, I'm a developer, mainly dealing with Microsoft software, not too shy of dabbling in other technologies either however.

I've been coding since 1998, started with Quick Basic and got my way op to VB6. Before that I mainly entertained myself with HTML, and hex editing all kinds of things. Computer age for me started at 7 years with an Amiga 500. Since 2001 I got into PHP and since then everything went a lot faster. Thanks to PHP I started learning Object Oriented programming, and it was also the language that brought me in contact with businesses, the first thing I coded for someone else was in PHP.

When I reached this point, I had learned everything myself. And then came the time I started learning to code in school.

Some languages I saw were:

• Batch


• Bash


• Perl


• COBOL


• RPG


• C++


• ASP


• SQL


• Java

And most importantly: C#

The year before we started getting C# in school, I already started learning it, and it's great. I'm addicted to C#, even more then I ever was to PHP.

C# got me in contact with everything .NET related. I love the framework, the power. It makes things much easier. It's even easy to convert code from VB.Net to C#! :)

Now I'm at a point where I got a decent coding background, I made all the usual coding mistakes (and probably will make a lot more), I got business experience, worked in a team and alone, big and small projects, internal and external. Technology still dominates most of my life, it's even relaxing in a way.

Have a look at cumps.be to get a more detailed overview of the projects I've worked and my skill set.

That's about it for now. If you want to know something, drop me a line!

Well, what have I done during the last year? First of all, I graduated from school with highest distinction and got a job as a webdeveloper, creating ASP.NET sites. Actually, I helped to come up with and create a rather generic cms-like framework that is being used for all future sites, cutting back on development time when administration sections have to be made, and when a lot of re-occurring things have to be implemented in a site. That's about the only vague description I can give, since it's "top secret" ;)


After a year, I changed jobs, to my current job. I'm now officially a Technical Consultant at Financial Architects. Finarch is, as the name gives away, a company active on the financial market, with a datawarehousing solution. Where-as I'll be implementing this solution, with a team of consultants, at clients. The main reasons I went for this function are firstly the fact I've been specifically hired to go abroad, which is a very nice opportunity for me, seeing I'm still young and have to take advantage of that fact. Secondly, it's a whole new world I can learn from, and as a consultant, you're expected to know your stuff, which means I'll be learning a lot of new things, which is always a fun thing :)


That's about it. It doesn't seem much, adjusting from school life to working life took some time for me, but blog posts should be coming again now. I also dumped World of Warcraft, so I finally have spare time again!

The first techy mention again on this blog since long:
This post is written with Windows Live Writer (Beta) and I really like it! It integrates smoothly in Community Server (which this blog is running on). It downloaded my blog style, allowing my to type this post in the style my blog is in, with the correct colors, and allowing me to get a live preview before publishing. And it has a built in spell checker.

I'll try out the image-inserting abilities a bit later, in my coming posts. The bad part is that it doesn't have tagging support for Community Server, or at least, I can't find it right away. Ok, it has support, it's just listed under Categories in the upper right corner, which I looked over.

Yesterday I got invited by Microsoft France to Paris, to the Wax Club, to see the French Visual Gaming Finals.

My team mate, ZogStriP, participated in the High School competition there, so it was very exiting!

It was also a very good experience to learn French ;) And to get to know Paris, where the people are really crazy in traffic. Apparently, stop signs are just for decoration... Green or red, it all means the same :p

They played the games before and played the replay files on big screen, which were also recorded by a french television station. The station is on satellite and is called GameOne, I don't know yet when they will broadcast it. I'll have to find someone who can digitally record it, because they interviewed me as well :p

So, the High School competition: there were 2 pools, one with 3 games and one with 6. Our best competitor was Z² who lost with a very little difference each time.

In the end, our dll won the High School competition! Resulting in a PDA for my team mate (I'm too old for High School ;p).

But here is where something special happened, he gave me the PDA!

He recently became MVS in France and just received one as well. Isn't it a nice gesture? Microsoft France made a very good choice making him MVS, he really deserves it with this kind of attitude, a real teamplayer. (So, for all French companies reading my blog, go to his blog and check it out, he would be a great asset for your company!)

After this, it was time for the Open Division.

There, our bot had a hard time. We lost the quarter finals by 1 point, due to a bug causing the AI to stop :/ So, chances for 1st and 2nd were gone. Finally we ended up at the fourth place, because the same bug occured again in the next game, which is really a shame.

One thing is sure, being 4th already is good, especially in France, the country of Visual Gaming, now we only have to fix this bug :p Result of ending on 4th place: A fingerprint reader and I also got interviewed, in English :p This is really a nice example of "dissolving boundaries" :)


And to finish, here's a picture of ZogStriP and me (ZogStriP right, me left):



To ZogStriP: Thanks!

The Developer & IT Pro Days 2005 are over, as well are my exams.

During day 2 we saw what is going to come with the next .NET version (partial files, generics, ClickOnce, ...) and what mistakes an admin can make in his IT setup and how to fix them.

The last one was really funny, but sadly enough those mistakes are often made, running SQL Server as SYSTEM, SQL Injection, simple passwords, no defense in depth, logging on as domain admin, ...

My exams are also over now, the last one of my current education, coming up next is a 3-month internship at Microsoft.

And just like Tom's doing, here is a picture of the Channel 9 guy, sitting together with the Azlan mascot on the tower of stuff I had to learn these last 3 weeks for my exams :)

The Developer & IT Pro Days 2005 are coming up in a few days and I'll be there.

I'll even talk there ;) for 5 minutes, about Alternate Data Streams.

It'll be my first talk in English in front of such an audience, what an experience :)

It's been a while ago since I posted something, it has been very busy over here, and now exams are coming up.

But after that I promise to post something useful again :) Maybe sooner...

But for now, I wish you all a Merry Christmas and a Happy Newyear.

Today I took the theoretical drivers license exam. And I passed it! With 0 mistakes! :)

The only thing that's left now is the practical exam. But that's still a couple of months away.

Exams are over and I got my results. I passed with 'Highest Distinction', you can only guess how happy I am :p

Details at: www.cumps.be.

Now only a half year of school left, and then it's time to do an interim at a company :)

I'm happy! A site I created for someone has won a price at the DigiKids 2004 Awards.

I heard there were 120 submissions, and the one I created ended up with the 10 best sites! This is a very nice extra as a student, now I can tell something I coded lasted between 120 others! :)


The results are in Dutch, but if anyone is interested: Prijs van de Minister van Onderwijs - Communicatorprijs.

Some extra info about the site: Connectedly

The Gatekeeper Test 2004 is over! EricM is the winner with 4680 points!

It was a nice contest, too bad I wasn't on time each day to catch the bonus points, but I did learn some new things :)

In the end, I'm quite happy! I finished on position 102 with 3950 points.

Can't wait for the next Gatekeeper, hope to do it even better in 2005 ;)

I'm proud. I've just been included in the MSDN list of Belux bloggers!

And I also got linked in the March issue of MSDN Flash! :)

I'm happy to be a part of such a big community, really makes you feel appreciated once. Thanks to everyone out there!