Well I waited until the last week of the year, but I did pass my 70-536 exam last week ….

Congratulations on Your Exam Success!

Congratulations on passing Microsoft® Certification Exam 536 – TS: Microsoft® .NET Framework 2.0 – Application Development Foundation. Your exam results have been received by Microsoft and your records are currently being updated to reflect this information.

Yeah! I had wanted to get this done in the spring and have had the study materials for over a year now – but it is good to have it done.  I’ve gotten the “nice try” e-mails before and they aren’t as much fun to get.

You “sign” a non-disclosure agreement when you take the tests, so I can’t go into much detail, but here is a “Top 10 List” of things that surprised me a bit on the test, and some things from the MCTS book (great study guide by the way – anyone can learn something from it).

• More on Reflection than I expected, and dynamic loading of assemblies
• Using COM from .NET and referencing .NET from COM (both ways)
• Lots of XML and binary serialization (know the differences) and deserialization
• Know how international/localization works (Culture/Region)
• Asynchronous calls, delegates, callbacks
• All about streams – crypto/hash/ssl, file, memory, buffered, compression, SOAP
• Security – various identity objects, users, tokens, app domains, permissions
• IEnumerator, IEnumberable, IComparable, IComparer
• ClickOnce & IsolatedStorage
• Value types, Reference Types (examples of both), Generic Collections

There is, of course, more than that, but these are the things that I remember most.  As with most tests like this, the work you are doing now will make certain questions seem really easy (e.g. I’ve been doing a lot with XMLSerialization, encryption, and compression lately, so those were pretty obvious) while Framework parts that you haven’t used much will seem hard (e.g. Localization, Windows Security, COM->.NET->COM, Reflection).

Now I just need to commit not to wait until December 2008 to take the next test or two.  I’ve got the MCAD (1.1) certification now, should finish the MCPD stuff soon (2.0) just in time for the 3.x stuff to come out.  It’s quite a moving target but at least it isn’t boring.