Why would I need to pass that exam at all?

There are many arguments to pass the exam. Most of them are simple bureaucracy. First of all, your resume will have additional strength if you will add few certification records on the bottom. Secondly, many companies are interested to have their employees to be certified, or maybe they want to make you promotion road more hard :) so to allow you to be promoted you need to pass some set of certificates and cope with lot of other requirements. At least this is situation which I have in my company.

Why would I need this exam for my blog?

Very easy: when YOU are on my blog first time, you read something and create your thought on topic you just read and then you decide to subscribe or not to subscribe. Question is following: what is guarantor that it worth to subscribe to my blog? And answer is “Nothing”. But what will be your reaction if you will see MVP logo at the top-right of my blog? Are my chances better? Or course they are.

Why else would I need this exam?

Following point is very important but honestly I could not put it above (I will describe why). The point is to enhance you knowledge and learn something new. Of course during preparation to exam you read some books and search over MSDN on topics you are interested and which will be measured. But in real life you could be experienced .NET developer and still have difficulties to pass exam. In other words I have doubts if 10 years experienced developer could pass exam without at least some special preparation to it.

What else did I miss?

Of course – self-confidence. In order to be successful you need to feel yourself confident in things you do. In order to grow you should have something behind you, that could you help stand when you are with people who have certificates. And plus to that it is always very enjoyable to know that you know more then others. But a secret: do not show them that. It is very important. Do not praise yourself, let others do it instead.

How to prepare and how did I prepare?

You could find a lot of very interesting posts over internet on how to prepare.

I like this one:
http://lukecummins.me.uk/2009/08/70-536-my-tips-for-this-microsoft-exam/

I even found other blogs that are about certification. 

My recommendation number 1: google on how to prepare… and you will find a lot of interesting stuff.
Also while you are trying some demo tests on MeasureUp or tests from TrainingKit and if you are not confident about answer do not try to remember it – go and figure answer in depth!

Also I wrote some tips on how to read TrainingKit. At least this works for me:

• Read accurately but quick if theme is familiar to you.Skip “Real
  Word” and pay attention on “Important” and “Exam Tip”, try to remember
  it!
• If there are boring explanation and then code, switch first to code
  and analyze if you understand everything there, and if that is true,
  don’t return back to text.
• Do not execute Labs unless you do not understand what you had read.
• If there are difficult chapters try to read them twice – I did this
  with Application Security.

How was it?

Night before exam I felt confident about exam, but was still worrying.. so I was preparing till 3am. In the morning I came to work as usual and did few things… reviewed ones code, checked e-mails… expressed my thoughts on demo we should have today and wrote e-mail to team members that I will be out for about 2 hours. My company is Microsoft’s parner so I do not need to move to other location – just get down 5 floors.
First couple of questions I was nervous, but then I felt that I’m confident with most of questions. I marked only 2 out of 40 for additional review. When I finished I got message saying that I PASSED EXAM with score 907. This means that I answered incorrectly for about 4 questions. I think that this is very good result.

Picture which I get is like following:

My next target is probably 70-505. Passing it is point of honour, because I already failed it twice because of overflow of confidence.

Also as I’m active in preparing developers meeting for developers from my project and I’m thinking to teach our developers in order to get certification – covering some areas from exam.

Express your thoughts on passing this exam.