This week I took exam 70-562 and earned MCTS ASP.NET 3.5 title. As with any Microsoft exam, there were simple or rather straightforward questions, there were some questions where single word decided which answer is correct (my approach is to take each single answer and try to see if it meets all requirements and all words in each requirement) and finally there were a few questions that covered stuff that a developer customized very rarely but thankfully usually one can deduct the correct answer. The good thing is that there wasn't anything outside the exam's objectives. However, I was struck by the number of questions related to Ajax and client-side scripting. Officially, there's supposed to be about 15% of questions on this topic and since there is 50 questions (!), there should have been about 7 - 8 questions on that subject. My impression was that there was more than 10. Therefore, I would encourage anyone thinking on taking this exam to really learn and understand Ajax and client-side scripting. I have posted a few posts on that, and I have to admit that I'm really happy that I have revisited Ajax recently. I would say understanding each topic from the exam's objectives is crucial. And Ajax is also one of them. But maybe you'll get fewer questions on Ajax and more on maybe WCF? That's why I would encourage everyone to learn Ajax but also WCF as both things are pretty new and definitely new on this exam comparing to the previous ASP.NET exams. Fortunately, Ajax is very popular and I think every .NET Web developer has some experience with that, but I know from my experience that not many developers utilize WCF services and still in production environments vast majority of distributed applications use ASMX services, WSE 3.0, enterprise services and MSMQ (System.Messaging) where with WCF you can have all of this as one technology but that requires knowledge and experience and of course some money to migrate existing technology to the new one. But there's also a lot of new projects that don't use WCF. That's why I would recommend spending some time to really learn it so you can start using it and hence get work experience as this is definitely the key to success - not only on this exam but also as a .NET developer.
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