Just Passed 70-541 - Technical Specialist: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 – Application Development

After the success of last week's exam (see http://ddkonline.blogspot.com/2009/01/just-passed-microsoft-exam-70-630-ts.html), I followed up with the Windows SharePoint services application development (WSS 3.0 development) exam. One of the main differences between the format of the 70-541 and 70-630 exam is that there is first a survey about (basically) how good you think you are at different areas of WSS development. I don't know if these affect the questions you are asked in the exam proper - but it is possible they use it as a way to choose the set of questions you recieve. Your guess is as good as mine, unless the folks at Microsoft/Prometric want to let us know how the application works...

The exam itself was slightly longer than the MOSS 2007 one (59 questions vs 51 questions) and as is typical for development exams - the difficulty level was a lot higher. You have to know some of your configuration basics PLUS the coding side of things. I came out of the exam after I got my score (900/1000) and was a little miffed that I answered the way I did for some of the questions. Many of the questions try to lead you up the garden path - and I probably was trying to anticipate what the exam creators were thinking a little too much.

I am considering Performance Point (70-556 - Technical Specialist: Microsoft Office PerformancePoint Server 2007, Applications) next as Oakton has some clients who are interested in using it - and skills in the area seem to be in short supply. One problem is that there are no recommended readings for the PeformancePoint exam, so it will largely be a Technet and MSDN study effort. I was in a similar situation for the ASP.NET 2.0 beta exams as well - so I should be OK.