Sasha Sydoruk

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Getting ready for 70-536

September 06th, 2006 | Category: .net

Currently I am getting ready to take Microsoft’s 70-536. Recently I found this great list of all the topics to the exam and links to msdn that explain them.

Edit:

Kevin asked me to link to a book that I am using to prepare for the exam; here it is - MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536): Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation. I have almost finished reading the book for the first time. I am going to reread it again and throughly work through the examples.

Here is my opinion about the book. It is pretty good. It covers a lot of topics and has more than 1000 pages. Because of the sheer breadth of the covered material some topics are not described in the detail they deserve. Despite of that, it is a great study guide. My rating – 85%.

Now, the testing software that comes with this book is unbelievingly lame. I cannot stress enough how lame and unusable that stupid software is. It is designed for screens with resolution 800 * 600. It looks like it was written in VB6, thus it does not scale well on high resolution monitors. I just cannot believe that this software was actually released. What a shame… I hope that other books in the series will have better software.

5 Comments so far

  1. Kevin C September 7th, 2006 10:03 am

    Can you post a link to the book that you bought in prep to this test.

  2. Peter September 8th, 2006 9:25 am

    I’m also studying for 70-536 and I also purchased the Self-Paced Training Kit. I was able to read through half of it before my life got really hectic. I plan on getting back to it soon but I thought book was really good. I learned a lot from it. And I’m assuming everything in this book could possibly be on the test so I’m trying to absorb as much of it as possible. As for the software, yes it was lame that they made the interface the way they did but I found the sample exam helpful. I’m assuming those questions are similar to the ones given on the actual exam.

    Sasha, when do you plan on taking the exam? Let me know how it goes. Good luck!

  3. Srik September 26th, 2006 6:50 pm

    Hi Sasha,

    I have also scheduled my 70-536 exam in Oct-2006. Are you done with yours? If so, could you please let me know how it went? I have started the MCTS Self-Paced training kit book (just went thru the first lesson) and it looks good. I still have to install VS 2005 and start working on the examples. Keep posting updates in this space. I will check them regularily.
    Good Luck.

  4. osydoruk September 28th, 2006 9:56 pm

    Hi Srik,

    Unfortunately, I haven’t taken the exam yet; some family stuff delayed the preparation. I will definitely blog about my experience studying for the exam and taking it. In the mean time, check out my post about a free e-book about .NET threading. It is really good. It was really helpful in understanding some of the confusing concepts that are not covered in the book.

    Take care,
    Sasha

  5. Srik October 27th, 2006 8:14 am

    Hello Sasha,

    Just wanted to drop an update from my end. I completed 70-536 today with a score of 894. Did you get yours done? Good Luck.

    - Srik

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