Sezai Passes Exam 070-542 - Microsoft Office SharePoint Server 2007 Application Development

YES I did it !

I just passed the MOSS 2007 development exam with a score of 959 / 1000 !

I completed the 3 hour exam in only half an hour.

For preparation I searched the internet and read other similar blog posts, then did what they did as far as getting test exams, and then studied the night before for about 5 hrs.

I might do one of the other WSS / MOSS exams to get MCTS SharePoint.... it would be nice to put into my email signature.

The Exam

Visit this http://www.microsoft.com/learning/exams/70-542.mspx it broadly describes what the test is about.

I think the exam is tough because MOSS is MASSIVE, and depending on your experience in developing solutions, you might only have worked with one slice of the MOSS Pie?(http://www.freshfromtheoven.co.nz/pages/home.aspx)

You might have only been involved in an Intranet project, or only a public internet wcm project etc. Depending on the specific MOSS solution, a single project would not make use of the entire pie.

Records Center, Information Management Policy, Excel Services and some InfoPath questions were tough because I haven't done as much custom dev in those areas, it was good to study for the exam because I now know more about MOSS as an entire development platform.

So the best advice I can give is focus on all of the Pie slices of MOSS especially the Pie slices with which you have had least experience working with. Mastering only one Pie slice won't be enough to pass. Eat the whole Pie, leave no slice untouched! Mmmmm Pie.

Still it was a tedious exam because a lot of the questions tested whether or not you know specific declaratives, methods and properties (meh what else would they test in a development exam?). Why, but why did I have to memorise the different nodes and structure of a BDC application definition? that wasn't fun at all.

When anyone is developing with Visual Studio .NET working on a MOSS development project in the real world, you have fast and easy access to information like this, you can easily look through the MOSS SDK or other documentation. With the advent of intelisense, classes that have methods/properties with comments, and due to the general size of the MOSS API, every developer wouldn't naturally try to wrote learn the entire class reference !

This leads me to believe exams are not a good way to test the ability of a developer, you can only learn this about someone by working with them for a while, the proof is in the work they produce.