If you haven’t heard yet, Microsoft has made some significant changes to the MCM program. The changes make the certification more accessible to the masses.
You can read more about that from sources such as the following:
This post is not so much about the changes. More it is about the information dissemination related to the MCM. I saw on twitter that there were some videos available to watch concerning the MCM training. I was curious where these videos were so I decided to go looking for the videos. In my search for the videos, I came across the Blog post referenced above by Jason Strate. In that post, he has a link to the videos. I decided to check out the videos and I decided to start downloading them so I could use them as study aids as I work on the MCITP.
Downloading those videos one by one is somewhat tedious and time consuming. Thus while some were in the process of downloading, I started working on a few other things and saw another twitter post come across about a Powershell script to download those MCM training videos. This is great news – except I have never run a powershell script.
Well, no time like the present to learn. First thing to do is to check out the blog article about the script – it has a few downloads. The blog post is by Eric Humphrey, and can be found here. After having read what he had to say about the script and downloading the necessary files that he lists, it was time to find out how to run a powershell script. A little looking and I came across this article.
Excellent I am well under way now to run this script. After following some of the recommendations in that article (e.g. security settings), it was time to look at the script and see what I needed to know from there, such as paths required for add-in files or paths for destination files. Some quick adjustments to the userprofile path and to the download directory, as well as copying the HTMLAgilityPack into the userprofile path – and we are all set.
Now I have the script running and downloading the files – but it looks like it is going to be running for a long time. This is a very useful tool for me at this moment. This demonstrates another use for Powershell as well. I haven’t yet decided that I will pursue the MCM, however I will use these videos to improve my knowledge base on SQL server. I would recommend that people go check out these videos. It was somewhat surprising to me to see that many of the pages had not been viewed very frequently at all. This is great training material. I recommend getting it and adding it to the reference material you may already have.
If you are just looking to browse the videos individually, you can find the site here.
