I Took The ASP.NET 3.5 Beta Exam, and then the red pill

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.