70-562 ASP.NET exam cleared!!! What a relief?

This exam was long, it covered a lot of material. The hardest .Net exam by far. 50 questions and 3 hours.

I used Microsoft Self-Paced Training Kit book to study for this exam. It took me over 2 months to study, 2-4 hours every day. I went chapter by chapter, doing the end of chapter exercises. But I was not ready for this exam.

One thing you should do before you start studying for this exam is review ASP programming. That is of course if you have not done much of ASP or ASP.NET programming. Concepts of web site setup, configuration, simple forms, database connectivity should be reviewed before diving deep into the above book.

If you never used server side controls you should carefully do and re-do chapter 2, but if you use server side controls everyday, 24/7, you can jump into web parts, data bound controls, templates.

Actually, I had more than few questions about the templated controls. You really have to know how they are setup and populated with data. You have to know how to update controls between update panels? How to post asynchronous or synchronous post backs?

The best way to do this is through examples. The books has some, others can be found on asp.net web site.

WCF and ADO.NET is something you have to know for this exam as well. If you have never used these, better start doing them now. This is an ASP.NET exam, so I was surprised to see so many WCF questions, but that is how this exam was structured. It covers ASP.NET and everything that ASP.NET touches.

Another thing that I remember from this exam is that it asked an awful lot of questions about state management, page caching, web farms, configuration and deployment. Questions were long, some of the coding examples were 2-3 pages long. I was really done for the whole day after I got out of this exam.

I'm glad this one is behind me. It was not an easy exam because of the shear volume of the material covered by this exam, but the questions were not difficult. You either knew the answer right away or not. Microsoft recommends you have few years of .NET coding experience. I have to agree with this.

I would say that coding experience is not enough, you have to study for this exam to pass it.

This is a very detailed exam and if you get by doing your web sites with a limited set of controls or ways to setup or configure your environment, you'll be tested on this exam. Trust me.