I took the ASP.NET 3.5 Exam (in beta form) on June 5th at Tech-Ed 2008 and today I received notification that …. I PASSED! Woohoo!

What does this mean? Well, it means that I’m now an MCTS in ASP.NET 2.0 and an MCTS for ASP.NET 3.5.

At Tech-Ed last week they offered the ASP.NET 3.5 Beta Exam. The beta exam is not available in Phoenix, so I decided to give it a whirl on Thursday. I didn't plan to take the test so I didn't have a lot of time to review (maybe 30 minutes of review) and I just dove in and took it.

Normally MS Exams have about ~40 questions and they take a couple of hours for me to complete. I was expecting the same from this one...

Nope. This exam had 70 questions. Wowza. I'm assuming the reason for this is one of these scenarios:

• This is a beta exam and they need to weed out some questions
• They have bumped up the number of questions in the exam

So how hard was it?

Well ... it's a little harder than the 2.0 version. A lot of it is repeated from 2.0, but this new beta exam threw me for a loop in a few areas.

The areas that threw me for a loop were:

• WCF Integration Questions (I'm very well vested in WCF, but I just was not expecting it in this exam - there's a WCF exam for that!)
• Deep AJAX Questions (Don't do much AJAX stuff, lets be honest... JavaScript is not my favorite language)
• Miscellaneous Mobile Questions

The main thing about MS exams is that they are LONG and tricky. Sometimes you'll get asked a question and all four answers look right. LOOK VERY CLOSE. You'll see that maybe one word is spelled wrong, or the line's are swapped, etc. They will confuse you. But the main thing to do is be alert. The test will wear on you, its long. By the 2.5 hours in, you'll get tired of the test and you'll want to just hurry through it, don't. Just take your time.

So How Did I do?

Since its a beta exam, I won't know for about 2-3 weeks. They send your results in the mail. I feel like I passed, but we'll see when the results come in.

... and no, I didn't take any pills before or after... :) I'm just joshin' ya'll.

I meant to post this a couple of weeks ago but unfortunately I didn't get the chance to. Anyway... I was a little bummed out to find that the ASP.NET 3.5 Beta Exams were being offered to MCP holders until late April (I believe it was up until yesterday), but unfortunately NOT A SINGLE EXAM SITE IN PHOENIX can house this Beta Exam.

I spoke to a ProMetric rep who stated that the exam sites such as Interface, ValorIT, and even ProMetric's own testing facility were not a high enough site rating. Apparently they need a level 4 site rating to hold these beta exams, these sites only obtain a level 3 or less rating.

Upon further inspection, the closest testing facility that would allow me to take this Beta exam was at Yavapai College in Prescott, AZ (see map below). Look how far away that is:

<-- Here's where it is in relation to Phoenix.

The part that baffles me is how Phoenix can be in the top 5 largest cities in the USA (I can't find my reference for when we passed Philly, but I heard we did somewhere - If I'm wrong, oh well) and we don't have a testing facility that allows us to take Beta Exams. Don't get me wrong, I'm happy that we even have facilities that do this, but I'm amazed that a city of this size does NOT have a level 4 facility in the metro area. Literally, the metro area almost spans nearly ~100 miles in diameter.

Anyway, I'll hit up the exams when they're released. No big deal. :) I was just amazed that we didn't have the capacity to hold these exams.

Here's the links for the .NET 3.5 Study Guides:

ASP.NET Application Development (70-562)

ADO.NET Application Development (70-561)