Kristian Kristensen’s Blog

It’s been pretty quiet around here, but now I have something to write about. In my last post I wrote about passing the MCTS Distributed exam, and that this meant I was on track for the MCPD Enterprise Application Development exam. Well, this Friday I took the exam and passed with 860 points. So I’m now officially an MCPD. This page with statistics of the number of MCP’s worldwide states that there are 3424 persons that holds this certification. The numbers are from January 2008. Somehow that doesn’t seem like a lot of people.

Anyway, I followed the recipe that seems to work for me. Read the Self-Paced Training Kit book and do practice exams. I read MCPD Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-549): Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications Using the Microsoft .NET Framework cover to cover, and did practice tests like MeasureUp.
For some strange reason I didn’t get a score report after my exam, so I can’t comment on how well I performed on different areas of the exam. However, I can comment a bit on the types of questions I was asked. Most of the questions involves a fair bit of text, stating requirements for a specific solution. The solution is then proposed and you need to answer if the solution fulfills the requirements and if not why not. It’s still multiple choice, but a tad more difficult than your standard techie questions. Mainly because they’re looking for a specific solution. And the answer is not always how you would go about doing it.
In summary after taking this exam I don’t find it particularly difficult if you’ve studied some kind of computer science or software engineering. A lot of this stuff is pretty basic, and easily approachable.

With the MCPD out of the way I don’t know what my next certification goals should be. Maybe I should focus on SQL Server or some Biztalk stuff. Maybe focus a bit on the Infrastructure and Server exams, which I’ll have to go for later this year anyway. I’ll keep the blog posted.