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I finally sat the MS 70-564 exam to get an MCPD last Wednesday. When I first started to study for it though, I had no clue what to study or where to get materials seeing as Microsoft decided not to print a book for this one. So I thought I’d share with everyone what I did to prepare for this exam.

First tip – don’t bother with practice tests. MeasureUp has no practice test for this exam and all the other providers have a dodgy reputation. I did try TestKing but their software didn’t work at all, which was disappointing. This makes it really hard to find out what type of questions the exam will have. I searched StackOverflow for answers and the only thing I found there was a hint that using the older book (547) wont really help that much (http://stackoverflow.com/questions/963998/studying-for-the-70-564-exam).

The exam focuses less on code and a lot more on decisions based on requirements. So for anyone with lots of experience in 3.5, the exam will be a lot easier. This is probably the same advice as in my post about the 70-536 exam, but just going through the syllabus is probably the best thing. You can find it on the Microsoft Learning website (70-564 Syllabus). You can pair that up with “Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5” for better coverage, but you can skip the basic sections and focus more on the high level stuff.

Finally, in that SO link above, theres someone who suggests that using the old book is no good. I can confirm that he is correct. Using the old 547 book would just be a waste of time. The exam is very 3.5 centric. This is a reverse of the first exam (536) for which one can comfortably study from the old book.

I hope that this helps any future MCPD-ers with their study.

So this last Thursday I attended the latest Auckland Web Meetup which proved to be a very entertaining and pleasant evening. I have to say a massive thanks to John Ballinger for organizing the whole thing as well as the speakers/panelists Giorgio Sardo, Nigel Parker, Robert O’Callaghan and Chris Double. John also had some great news about the meetup moving to a new premises at the Vodafone HQ in the viaduct.

The evening started off with Giorgio speaking about IE8 and how it relates to HTML5. He showed a few demos of implemented HTML5 features but spent most of his time showing off the impressive amount of work that the IE team has done to come up to speed with current standards. We got told a particularly sad story about the poor guy whose sole job is to write CSS tests – of which he has so far written ~7200 of. Giorgio gave a very enlightening presentation which I believe effectively illustrated a major shift of attitude within Microsoft towards the web and related standards.

After Giorgio’s talk, all 200 of us feasted on hot pizza from Pizza Hut and drank the nectar of gods, Epic Pale Ale.

Next up were Robert and Chris with some very impressive – though sometimes exaggerated - demos. Don’t get me wrong, all the demos were extremely cool, I just had trouble imagining real world uses for some of them. Overall it was an interesting showcase of the cutting edge technologies being baked into Firefox – all of which can be played with right now if you get the latest daily build.

To end the evening a panel was held and preselected question were posed to the speakers – which resulted in some interesting discussions. The biggest topic though was the video tag and Mozillas reluctance to use the H.264 standard. Chris made some good points, one of which even got applause – but I still believe that they are fundamentally gimping the future of the web with their decision to not support H.264. Robert made a point about not breaking the web earlier in the evening, but their refusal to incorporate this widely spread codec, I believe is going to do just that.

After the meetup finished I think everyone was glad to get out into the fresh air – let me tell you, 200 odd developers/designers in a small room with no air conditioning gets pretty hot pretty quickly. What a great evening though

Last Thursday I sat MCTS 70-562, the second out of three planned exams and as I promised myself, I got a better score than the first one. Its up for debate whether this was because I had more time or whether it was just luck, but the burning question that I came away from the exam with was “What does this score really mean?”.

I am perfectly aware that the score is ultimately not important; whoever looks at your transcript only sees that you passed, and since the pass mark is 80% and above everyone knows that you have done well at the very least. But I just can’t resist a good mystery. The following is a dissection of my personal score on this particular exam – I make a number of assumptions that may or may not be incorrect. Please consider that before you take my word as gospel.

The logic

There are 50 questions which means that each question is worth 2%. This brings me to the following assumption: Each question is worth the same amount of points

Seeing as the pass mark is 80% then 700 is 80% of 875. My score (826) is 94.4% of 875. This is an impossible score as that would require that each question was not 2% exactly. Hence the 700 is the fixed point and 0% and 100% are relative to it.

There are 7 areas in this particular exam and seeing as how I didn’t get zero NOR full points in any section, that would mean that each section comprises of at least 2 questions. This furthermore means that I got at least 1 question wrong in each section, which means that my final score was no more than 43 out of 50 (86%). We can also conclude that I didn’t get less than 41 out of 50 (82%) since if I got 40 I would be left with a score of 700.

Now we are starting to see a clearer picture. A score of 826 on this exam should mean a score of between 82% and 86%. But if you then try to find the upper and lower limit for the score you get some absurd results.

So where does that leave us? Either my first assumption is incorrect or I am looking at this from a completely wrong angle. However the bar diagram and the enigmatic score you are left with once you’ve passed your exam doesn’t have to be a closed book. Microsoft may have made the score as hard to interpret as possible to prevent cheating. Or maybe its very simple and the questions are weighted. Maybe with a larger sample of scores it would be easier to interpret. For now I must be happy with this.

Just recently I sat the MCTS 70-536 exam (.NET 3.5) and seeing as it was my first Microsoft certification, I had no idea what to expect. Now that I have successfully completed it, I’d like to put down a few tips for those who are in a similar position to myself. Without further ado:

Tip #1: If you want to ace this exam you need more than the self-paced training kit

The single most important fact about this particular exam (though it might apply to others as well) is that the MS Press book is only good enough for a pass. It fails in a few key areas:

• Review/Practice questions don’t properly convey the difficulty or style of the exam questions
• Some inappropriate advice that less experienced developers won’t know NOT to take
• Too much depth in certain areas that are not extensively tested (regular expressions is a prominent example) and too little depth in ones that are

In saying that, the book is enough to get a pass. But if you want to ace the exam you’ll need…

Tip #2: Get 3rd party practice tests

Companies like MeasureUp specialise in producing high quality practice tests for all sorts of qualifications form a lot of different vendors. While their website/software may not be the prettiest, the quality of the questions is high. If you have the book you may notice that the practice exam software is powered by MeasureUp, but the questions themselves are of low quality. This is only on the book CD – the real deal is much better. Also if you (or your employer) do shell out for the MeasureUp tests, you can buy a discounted test voucher from them at the same time which offsets the cost of the tests a little bit.

Tip #3: Code as you learn

Keep Visual Studio open while you’re learning and code alongside. Theres nothing like coding the examples to help you remember subtle nuances when you get a tough question on security.

Tip #4: Familiarise yourself with the exam requirements

One of the bigger mistakes I made was not looking at the skills measured tab section on the official 70-536 page. There they have a full list of exactly what you’re going to get tested on, including the percentage of questions in the exam related to the topic – which after doing the exam I can confirm are pretty accurate. So, my advice is, spend more time studying the topics with the largest percentages – those will obviously be the ones with the most indepth questions.

Tip #5: Don’t get overconfident

I have 5 years experience with ASP.NET and when I startedy studying there was nothing to indicate how difficult the exam would be, so I naturally felt a bit confident. No matter how experienced you are these exams are serious exams – the longer you spend preparing the better.

My experience

Now I get to rant about my experience. Unless you’ve done this before the whole process is a bit confusing and no site bothers to explain it to you. Here is the simple process:

• Go to Microsoft Learning and choose the exam you’d like to sit
• The next thing you need is a provider. Go to Prometric and find the exam you want to sit
• Before you book it you’ll need to register. Because the Prometric site has no registration (or login) link ANYWHERE on its home page, you can find them here: register/login
• Now you just need to choose a venue close to you

Simple huh? Its a wonder noone’s set it down before.

I only had 2 weeks to study and I did pass, but I did not ace the exam. I’m pretty sure if I had known what I know now I could have prepared better. My next exam (70-562) is in a few weeks and this time I’m determined to do better. I’ll report on that experience after my exam.

Useful links:

• Official MCTS 70-536 web page
• MeasureUp Practice Tests C# and VB
• Prometric – register/login
• MCTS 70-536 Self-paced training kit on Amazon

NB: If anyone from Prometric ever reads this, please, please, please do something about your horrid website. Take it from a web developer – it is an excruciating user experience.

Well it’s certainly been a busy few weeks. April has really been a full on month for me, with Easter, the Y88 national champs (sailing) and a holiday to New Caledonia starting tomorrow.  But the one event I really wanted to talk about is the Expression for Art’s Sake (EFAS) event that Nigel Parker from Microsoft kindly organised for the web community. EFAS was held at the Holiday Inn in central Wellington from Monday 20th to Thursday 23rd April. Before I go on with the rest of the details I just want to mention how professional and friendly all the staff were at Holiday Inn as well as every place that I visited while in Wellington. I was simply blown away by the level of service received.

EFAS was an invitation only event which was attended by 37 or so web professionals from across the country. The presenters/mentors were Nigel Parker, Tim Heuer and Arturo Toledo. The goal was simple: to learn and innovate with Silverlight through a hands on experience. This meant that while there were presentations the majority of the time was spent actually USING Silverlight as opposed to HEARING about it. In the end I believe this made a huge difference to everyone who attended.

The first day was spent in introductions, setting up computers (for those that didn’t have all the tools installed – sorry!!) and writing a “Hello, World!” app in Silverlight. A nice touch was that Nigel had organised Windows 2008 R2 Beta servers – 1 for each team – to make development and showing off at the end easier. The day finished off with a game of Werewolves (with Dora the Explorer cards no less).

The second day we really got into some serious hands on stuff. The first activity was designing a mobile phone for a kiwi bird. There were some really great ideas from all teams like sending smells as a way for kiwis to communicate, which I really liked. Next activity we designed a calculator as a way to practice DependencyProperties in Silverlight and for the rest of the day we worked on our projects. The last 2 days people worked on their projects, interspersed with short presentations from Nigel, Arturo and Tim.

On the last night, while sitting in a pub my team decided to stop working on the booking app seeing as it was simply too complex to finish in time and decided to implement our design of the kiwi mobile phone. In the end I think that was a good decision, since this gave us a lot broader coverage of Silverlight capabilities from both a designer and developer perspective. We did run into a few hitches (all of which had workarounds), which I will blog about separately once I’m back from my holiday.

All in all I think it was a very sucessfull week. Everyone learned a lot and the mentoring from Tim and Arturo helped heaps. If I could improve anything, it would be to make it a day longer just so that there is a proper wind down. I’m really looking forward to working with Silverlight more.