MCPD 4.0

I passed exam 70-521 last week.

  I found the exam a bit different than other Microsoft exams that I have taken.  The content of the questions were pretty straightforward (except some of the LINQ questions were a bit contrived).  The biggest difference to prior exams is that you can apply test-taking strategies because on 95% of the questions, the answer was provided.  There were few, if any “none of the above” as answers.  That means it was fairly easy to use process of elimination  to narrow down the potential answers.

In other news, I created a slide deck to play before the TriNug meeting tomorrow night.  It is like the advertisements that play at some movies before the previews.  I took most of the questions from the MSFT training kit – though I threw in 1 question that I remember vividly from the exam.  I couldn’t remember it exactly, but the intent is like this:

What code sample makes this window in WPF (line numbers are for reference only)?

A:

1. <DockPanel>            
2. <Button Content="Top" DockPanel.Dock="Top"/>            
3. <Button Content="Bottom" DockPanel.Dock="Bottom"/>            
4. <Button Content="Left" DockPanel.Dock="Left"/>            
5. <Button Content="Right" DockPanel.Dock="Right"/>           
6. <Button Content="Center"/>        
7. </DockPanel>

B:

1. <DockPanel>            
2. <Button Content="Top" DockPanel.Dock="Top"/>            
3. <Button Content="Bottom" DockPanel.Dock="Bottom"/>            
4. <Button Content="Left" DockPanel.Dock="Left"/>            
5. <Button Content="Center"/>      
6. <Button Content="Right" DockPanel.Dock="Right"/>             
7. </DockPanel>

C:

1. <DockPanel>            
2. <Button Content="Left" DockPanel.Dock="Left"/>
3. <Button Content="Top" DockPanel.Dock="Top"/>   
4. <Button Content="Center"/>         
5. <Button Content="Bottom" DockPanel.Dock="Bottom"/>            
6. <Button Content="Right" DockPanel.Dock="Right"/>           
7. </DockPanel>

D:

1. <DockPanel>            
2. <Button Content="Top" DockPanel.Dock="Top"/>            
3. <Button Content="Bottom" DockPanel.Dock="Bottom"/>            
4. <Button Content="Left" DockPanel.Dock="Left"/>            
5. <Button Content="Right" DockPanel.Dock="Right"/>           
6. <Button Content="Center“DockPanel.Dock
7. </DockPanel>

It’s easy enough to figure out the answer – just copy past each possibility into a WPF form in VS2010.

In any event, I am going on vacation next week so I won’t post back here for 2 weeks.