Born to Thrive

This week I finally took the 70-561 exam. Finally because originally I scheduled it last month but because I couldn’t make it, I had to reschedule it. Unfortunately, if you don’t show up on the exam, Prometric doesn’t allow for rescheduling it so basically you’ll have to schedule it from scratch and pay for it again. Don’t even bother appealing – they don’t understand that there was an accident and you couldn’t make it or you were on call and you had to stay at work. The worst thing in it is that currently they are allowing for retaking the exam for free if you have failed, but if you didn’t show up, you have to pay again. The only good thing about it is that I had a month more to study. Actually, I have started learning to the next and final exam, which is the 70-565 exam – MCPD Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 – so I would assume that it should take me about 2 months to get prepared for that exam. But as far as the 70-561 exam is considered, there are 46 questions and 170 minutes for answering them. I think the percentages, indicating the relative weight of each major topic area on the exam, that are shown on the 70-561 exam skills measured page, are pretty accurate. I had 5 questions on the Entity Framework, 5 questions on the Microsoft Sync, quite a few questions on typed DataSet, even more questions on DataSet, DataTable, DataRelation, which is generally the Core ADO.NET. One disappointment was that I have no questions on LINQ to SQL. I had maybe 2 questions on LINQ queries but no LINQ to XML. I remember that in one review to the 70-561 exam training kit book someone wrote that he hadn’t had any XML whereas someone else in another review to the same book wrote that he had found chapters on XML very helpful as he’d had some questions about XML on his exam. I can confirm that I had questions about XML, which in my case was ADO.NET XML api.. Generally, I didn’t find the exam very difficult as I scored 970 out of 1000, but only because I’d had a lot of experience with ADO.NET. It looks like I made a mistake in one question on the Entity Framework – probably because that’s something I have been doing for a short time. About study materials, I would recommend the Programming Entity Framework book, Pro Sync Framework book (make sure you are familiar with all classes and how to use them so anyway I would recommend reading the help file that comes with Microsoft Sync Framework - SyncSDK_v2.chm), ADO.NET 2.0 Core Reference and Advanced Topics and ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook and maybe something for LINQ. As always the most important thing is to read the questions carefully and make sure that your answer meets ALL the requirements from the question. It is especially important when you have a question in which you think more than one answer can be correct (unless it’s multiple choice question). Plus as always be prepared to have a question that requires out of scope knowledge, which covers other Microsoft technology like T-SQL, SQL Server, Windows OS, Power Shell, WCF, etc. It may even have sense as at the end of the day you’re not working only with ADO.NET but also with .NET, Windows OS, databases, some tools like Power Shell, etc. and you need to know how to react during integration problems like how to tell in ADO.NET that SQL Server is down or that the given T-SQL query will error out and will return the SqlException object. I am really happy that I have taken 70-441 exam – MCTS SQL Server 2005 – it did help me with some of the questions on my exams. I’m telling you, the more exams you have taken, the easier it will be on the next one.