MCPD Web Developer exam 70-547 hints and tips

Following my post about studying toward MCPD certification, I’ve now taken the exam and am pleased to say I passed with a good score. The exam 70-547 is about designing and developing web applications using ASP.NET 2.0. It focuses on the full software development lifecycle and covers planning, architecture, design, testing and deployment, where as the prerequisite MCTS exams cover more of the actual coding and implementation details.

My main study guide was the official Microsoft Press book, MCPD Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-547). It covered the syllabus thoroughly enough to get me through the exam, but like most similar books wasn’t much fun to read. It’s over 700 pages, and after the first few hundred the content starts to get fairly monotonous. It’s also difficult to skim because you might miss something essential for the exam. If you’re an experienced developer then you might not learn much, but if you’re new to coding then you should find plenty of useful information about broader areas of software development, such as architecture, data modelling and unit testing.

A lot of the testing chapters read like an advert for Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) and aggressively promote its unit testing and web load testing capabilities. There’s nothing wrong with that, it’s a Microsoft exam after all, but you will need Visual Studio Team Test if you want to work through the practical exercises (an evaluation version is available). The unit testing in VSTS is impressive, but doesn’t seem to offer much over the freely available NUnit. The web load testing on the other hand is invaluable.

My best advice for the book is to read it in short frequent bursts. Try to read a little bit every day and you’ll easily work through it, so don’t be intimidated. If you find yourself slacking, just register for the exam and you’ll soon become motivated. And remember to use the 15% exam discount voucher that comes with the book.

My other study resource, which I also used for the MCTS exams, was the practice test from MeasureUp. The questions are very relevant to the actual exam, and helped highlight areas to focus my study. The most useful feature is that every answer has an explanation, so if you get one wrong you can see why and hopefully fill a gap in your knowledge.

The exam isn’t easy, but many questions appeal to common sense as well as technical expertise, and there aren’t any trick questions. There’s more than enough time to work through the 40 multiple-choice questions, so be careful to read each one closely and don’t panic. Some questions ask you to pick more than one answer so follow the instructions carefully. The passing score is 700 out of 1000.

According to Microsoft’s statistics there are only 2,147 MCPD web developers worldwide, so if you want to improve your skills, stand out in the job market, or negotiate a promotion then certification could be a great career move.

My next goal is MCTS certification for SQL Server and exam 70–431. Then it shouldn’t be too long before the next generation of .NET 3.5 MCTS are available.

Let me know your experiences of studying of taking the MCPD exams in the comments below.