Passed exam 70-599!

by Mister Goodcat 15. July 2011 08:09

Edit (2011-07-31): Woops, I just realized that I accidentally forget to make this post public. The original upload date was July 15th.

When I was working on my article series about how to prepare for the Windows Phone 7 certification exam 70-599 over at Silverlight Show (you can find the series here), I was eager to take that exam myself. Originally I had planned to take the beta exam, but missed the timeframe when it was available, so I had to wait until the official release date, which was planned for July 14th.

On July 11th I visited the Prometric website to check something different for a client and realized that the Windows Phone exam was available for scheduling already, so I spontaneously picked the first possible date to attempt it myself, which was July 12th. If you follow me on Twitter you may know already that I passed the exam that day, which of course made me very happy :). This morning the corresponding entry showed up on my MCP site.

For me, equally important as passing the exam was to see whether my preparation articles really are useful to people who want to prepare for this certification, and if they cover everything that is required. Well, if you have ever taken one of Microsoft's certification exams and are familiar with the regulations, you know that you are not allowed to talk about any of the exam content or modalities, so I'm obviously not going into any details here; however, it's safe to say that yes, these articles are a good guideline for everybody who wants to take this exam. You can use it to double-check whether you have enough experience in all required areas, and to brush up your knowledge on those parts that you have only barely dealt with or feel insecure about.

So I hope that this contribution to the community will be a continued help and actually encourages devs to get an official validation of their knowledge by taking this exam!

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Programming

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Comments (2) -

8/4/2011 3:15:09 AM #

chucky

Goodcat,

Congratulations on passing the exam!

Do you think Microsoft will offer a course at some point for 70-599 like they have for other exams?

Have you taken the other 2 tests for the MCPD (Exam 70-5161: TS: Accessing Data with Microsoft .NET Framework 4 and Exam 70-506: TS: Silverlight 4, Development)?

If yes, did you take the review courses and find them useful?

Thanks,

chucky United States |

8/4/2011 10:33:14 AM #

Mister Goodcat

Hi and thanks :). I have taken quite some exams over the last years, but to be honest I have never used any of the courses. What I do for preparation is go through the exam contents provided on the official site and make sure I feel familiar and comfortable with all the topics. In the very beginning some years ago I tried to use preparation books for the exams but quickly learned that this is not the way I like and enjoy to prepare and learn. Instead, what I do now is search for good blog posts, read MSDN documentation (yes, really) and other good resources (MSDN magazine etc.), watch videos etc. from events where people really know what they are talking about and so on. This helps a lot to brush up my knowledge or complete it where I am missing details. For the 70-506 exam (Silverlight) in particular I have also used the articles of Gill Cleeren as a rough guideline:
www.silverlightshow.net/.../...e-exams-Part-1.aspx
My personal opinion is that nothing beats hands-on experience. Some things are hard to understand in full detail and to internalize if you don't actively use them or at least have used them e.g. in a real project once. I think Microsoft often recommends 2 or more years of experience with a technology before taking an exam - while I think that this is too general (it mostly depends on the intensity etc.), I agree that you should at least have worked with it for a while.

Mister Goodcat Germany |

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