Reflections on having taken BETA Exam 71-553

The format for Exam 71-533 was different than other Microsoft Exams I has taken in the past. It included 89 total questions broken into groups of 30, 29 and 30. Each Group corresponded to a Section in the list of topics the exam was supposed to cover. And once you finished a section you couldn't go back. Most of the exam focused on just the new features of .Net 2.0

The first section focused on Web Development.

No big surprises if you studied the topics. Questions on Web Parts, Master Pages, Themes, ADO.Net centric questions, SiteMap and TreeView, User Controls, the new Wizard Control, Tracing, The new membership provider model.

The second section focused on Windows Development

It covered a lot of Xml Centric questions, validating a schema, More ADO.Net stuff, MultiThreading with the Background Worker Process, transactions, BulkCopy, Database Factory, Deploying with Click Once, Code Access Security.

The third section was more framework stuff.

It covered Crypto, Generics, Enumerators, Queues, Serialization, DriveInfo, Compressing with GZip and Deflate, Security stuff.

Exam 70-553 - Add and configure Web server controls.

Exam 70-553 - Implementing globalization, drawing, and text manipulation functionality in a .NET Framework application