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.