Hurray, I passed my first Microsoft exam!

After some months of preperations I have managed to pass the ASP.NET 3.5 Microsoft 70-562 Certification Exam. I would like to share some of my experiences associated with taking this examination.

First of all, I am quite proud to be one of the few people in Poland to pass this exam. According to the statistics on this Microsoft page there were only 2 people in our country at the end of January who passed it. The flavor of success is therefore a little more sweet, especially considering the fact that the official Microsoft training book for this exam will be coming out in April 2009.

The ASP.NET 3.5 exam is part of the new Microsoft Certification scheme that was launched at the end of last year. For Web developers, instead of going the 70-536, 70-528, 70-547 route the better option now is to follow 70-536 and 70-562 for MCTS and then continue on getting the associated MCTS for other technologies: WCF, ADO, Windows Forms. This is the way I am planning to follow in the future.

The 70-562 exam itself is pretty difficult. It is built on top of ASP.NET 2.0 (70-528) exam by adding the ASP.NET AJAX technology and among others LinqDataSource, ListView etc. There is a detailed Microsoft Preparation Guide that turns out to be pretty accurate. Although I have to admit that there seemed to be more percentage of questions associated with ASP.NET Ajax and Mobile developmnet than it was indicated there.

The following list contains some areas that were addressed in the 50 questions of my particular exam:

• membership
  
• authentication and authorization
  
• session state in SQL Server
  
• using aspnet_compiler.exe
  
• ListView, GridView,TreeView
  
• registering and loading custom controls
  
• using Wizard
  
• using XmlDocument
  
• DataSet and DataView
  
• Calling WCF from client script
  
• tracing (ASP and .NET)
  
• health monitoring
  
• detailed usage of ASP.NET AJAX
  
• control device-specific rendering
  
• implementing control adapters
  
• application theming and recources
  

The questions were more difficult than the sample ones contained in the official training book for the 70-528 exam. Most of the time the problems reflected the programmatic approach instead of the declarative one. For example, it is not enough to know how to use and configure WCF or Web Services in the web.config file. It is necessary to know how to create appropriate channels from the code. Similarily, one can expect questions on programmatic handling of Asynchronous Ajax parameters and so on. I already mentioned that the official preparation book for this exam will be available in April. For those who want to take the 70-562 exam before this book is out, I recommend using the 70-528 book plus the msdn library . I was also using this ASP.NET AJAX in Action which I strongly recommend.