I passed the 70-564 Microsoft exam on Saturday and the 70-536 exam on the previous Thursday. That gives me a MCTS: NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Applications and a MCPD: Designing and Developing ASP.NET Applications using Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5. So now I get to officially use another logo:

The last exam was actually the easiest despite it being for the more advanced qualification. The MCPD focuses more on what is the best fit for a particular scenario, which is a pretty close fit to what I do every day. The MCTS, on the other hand, focuses on having fairly intimate knowledge of the .NET framework.

There are two reasons I've been doing these, firstly I'd like to get Gibe to the Microsoft Certified Partner level in the Microsoft Partner Network. Secondly I thought it would be interesting and I might learn something which turned out to be the case as I've had to learn some of the newer parts of the framework which I hadn't encountered before.

As part of getting Gibe accredited as a Microsoft Certified Partner I've set myself the task of becoming a Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer, and after a few weeks of sporadic reading and a bit of playing around in Visual Studio I passed my first Microsoft exam yesterday with a reasonable score, I'm now one exam away from a MCTS (Microsoft Certified Technical Specialist) in MS .NET Framework 3.5, ASP.NET Application Development.

It's been something I've been meaning to do for quite some time and just never got round to. How hard could it be having been writing ASP.NET applications since version .NET 1? Turned out to be slightly trickier than I had first thought. I'd bought the official Microsoft Press Training Kit for the exam and run through that. I hadn't used much of the official ASP.NET AJAX, Linq, WCF services or Microsoft Mobile technologies so had to study those in quite a bit of detail and I'd found that I'd got stuck in a bit of a working like it's .NET 1.1 rut, I tend to follow the rule: when in doubt, go with what you know, and I hadn't picked up some of the newer controls and methods of doing things. The Training Kit had a practise exam, which was useful for checking what areas I needed to work on, although both the book and the exam had a few errors which had me second guessing my own judgement, this question had the most obvious error.

The actual exam wasn't too bad after a few tricky early questions that had me worried. They said to allow 3 1/2 hours for the exam but I was in and out in about 1 1/2. The exam software was a bit frustrating, there were some questions where you have to essentially figure out which code block is the correct one by comparing several. They put all of this in a fairly small scrolling region which makes it harder work than it needs to be. You get an instant pass fail and a summary print out on the way out showing how you did in each of the seven different areas covered by the exam. 

Now it's just two more exams to get my MCPD!