70-511 Passed

Yesterday I passed the exam MCTS Windows Applications Development with Microsoft .NET Framework 4 which completes my seventh MCTS – although the first in Windows client development.

I did an MCTS exam a while ago, and I was a bit shocked how easy it was – I “overprepared” myself.. I thought that you can pass this one with a deep understanding of the .NET Framework and a little WPF knowledge – but this way, you’d need to use your common sense.

There were some questions on WPF and Windows Forms integration, but you could figure them out with a little thinking. Also there were some on UI aligning, UAC, ClickOnce abd parallelism. The questions were that MCTS type, so they focused on how to do something instead of why, but that was expected.

My next goal is the .NET 4 Windows MCPD exam – which is filled with cool architectural decisions, as I looked briefly on the skills measured section.

Implement screen layout by using nested control hierarchies

May include but is not limited to: using panel-derived controls, attaching properties

OK, as I promised, let’s get into the WPF business. As you may already know, WPF is a revolutionary UI system. It is revolutionary, because it breaks up with the messy, evil, sluggish, hellish, whatever bad property you can invent here, way of handling the screen real estate (you know, win32 and GDI+), and takes it to a new level where you can create a localization friendly UI which supports all possible screen sizes equally well, just by thinking of it, with the sacred milcore.dll.

OK, I hope you spot the irony up there. But WPF is in fact revolutionary in handling UI rendering and a lot of things, but it isn’t that easy. Especially if you are, like me, the guy who drags some controls into a form, and call that a UI. You can of course drag controls in the designer to a form, but surprisingly, that does the things WPF was made to fight with: hard-coding coordinates (OK, the coordinates won’t get hard coded, but their margin property will), so forgot the crappy designer built into VS and write XAML by hand, like real coders do! (Irony +1).

Getting Certified – 70-511

OK, I’ve finished my semester, so it’s time to get certified in something – I’ll do the exam 70-511 Windows Application Development with .NET 4. This should be an easy go, but I hardly used WPF in the past few months, so it’s time to dig deep into it.

There’ll be posts for each exam objective, started from today, so check back some eight hours later. I’ll start with the UI topic (Building a User Interface by Using Basic Techniques). I have the Apress title Pro WPF in C# 2010 and I think it’s massive weight of 1200 pages have everything that is needed for this one. If it wouldn’t be the case, I’ll check MSDN for further instructions, as usual.

So prepare to get certified!