It’s been quite some time (C++/MFC/COM era) since I’ve updated my Microsoft certifications, so with the brand-new .NET 2.0 exams trickling out, now seemed like a good time to renew. The goal this time around: MCPD Enterprise Applications, or Microsoft Certified Professional Developer: Enterprise Applications Developer. (If you hadn’t heard, Microsoft revamped the certification program yet again.)
I started off by taking 70–529 – .NET 2.0 Distributed Application Development about a week ago. This is a 40 question, 2 hour (maximum) test that covers Web services, WSE 3.0, Remoting, MSMQ, “serviced components” (i.e. COM+) and asynchronous calling patterns and Remoting events. The interesting things about this test are that 1) Remoting is an almost-dead technology and 2) WSE 3.0 is not even part of the .NET Framework.
Remoting still exists in .NET 2.0, but no one at Microsoft will recommend writing any new code with it. It’s really only there for backward compatibility. You should have heard of Windows Communication Framework (formerly Indigo) by now, and Remoting will truly be dead when it arrives. Remoting should have had little or no presence in this brand-new test, but it’s there, so you need to know it.
Aside from that, the rest of the topics are quite relevant to any .NET developer writing distributed applications today. The questions are multiple-choice style, with choose-one, choose-two, and choose-all variants.
Final result: Pass, score 953 (passing is 700).
