Today i became a Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) on Windows Mobile Application Development.
I have been working with device development for a while, developing large scale enterprise business applications, deployed to 10k+ Microsoft Windows Mobile devices so i am quite sure i know what I am doing. But as always with MS exams, things need to be done the Microsoft way – which tend to be not so efficient always, and not focused on enterprise needs or patterns. So to prepare myself i purchased the Windows Mobile Developer Handbook, and I also decided to try out an E-Learning course collection from Microsoft. The online course is easy to follow and have a nice look and feel, all the courses can be downloaded for and you can use the E-Learning offline player to do them in offline mode and synchronize your progress.
E-Learning offline course player
There also is a set of virtual labs in this course that must be done online, they’re not available from the offline player. I never managed to log on to the virtual lab machines, where was some mismatch between the virtual machine keyboard, using en-use and my keyboard set to no-nb. I could have changed my local keyboard locale but i didn’t bother. All in all, the course collection teaches you what you need to know to take the exam. I also encourage you to read the developer handbook it is a good companion to the online course. Just ignore the bit where it says it advices you to not develop applications using the touch screen for navigation…. That is wrong in so many ways.
The exam in it self was quite easy, focusing on SqlCe, RDA and Platform interoperability. In my exam i did not get any questions on hardware or windows forms or controls. couple of questions on thread synchronization and XmlWebServices. As always there are “trick” questions and answers so it is very important to read each question and of the answer alternative thoroughly.
To me these MS exams is not any kind proof of being a guru developer, or that I actually am a technology specialist, it’s mere a indicator showing that you have the basic skills needed to device applications development in a professional environment.
It felt good to have completed the exam, and it gives me confidence to know that i have the minimum of competence needed to talk about application development on mobile devices.
Last month i completed the .NET 2.0 Application Development Foundation exam (MS 70-536) that also proves that I have basic skills in .NET 2.0 development, which also is good to know after working with .NET since 2001 :)
Next I’ve started learning WPF. I did consider the MS 70-505, the Windows Forms Application Development exam, but since the release of WPF i just don’t find it interesting, and see no reason or use for winforms unless you need to maintain older winform based applications, or for some reason are not allowed to develop for WPF due to backward compatibility on (really) old frameworks. Skip it and go directly for the MS 70-502 exam. My goal for the WPF exam is to get a basic knowledge of the platform so that I’ll be ready when Silverlight for Mobile gets released
