Exam 70-526 with Home Learning College

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Hi All,

Unfortunatley I was stupid enough to sign the contract with Home Learning College for the 70-526 exam.
The learning books are full of mistakes, bad practice and so on and have decided to stear away from using any learning materials the college has to offer - can anyone point me in a good direction for learning? I started in April 2009 and I've only passed 2/6 of their assignments so far - I have one year in April to pass the course, although I'm not too bothered about failing the assignment work, it's the MCP exam I want to pass.

Thanks,

Liam

 

Oh man! Ad-blocking software has been detected! :'(

This website is run by the community, for the community... and it needs advertisements in order to keep running. Blocking our ads means your killing our stats!
Please disable your ad-block, or become a premium member to hide all advertisements and this notice.

Well unfortunately 70-526 isn't much good without 70-536, you need both to get the MCTS on Windows Development in .NET v2.0. Once you get them there is one comparatively easy design exam to pass to get MCPD.

The 70-536 is a seriously tough exam though, I'd advise most people to maybe look into the v4.0 track.
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/certification/cert-vstudio.aspx#tab2

Yes there are upgrade exams but the technology moves pretty fast, and v2.0 to v4.0 will require you to take two upgrade tracks as you must go v2.0 -> v3.5 -> v4.0. At which point you must take many more exams to get to v4.0 MCPD than just starting from scratch...

Microsoft is also already well into development of the next .NET (v4.5/5.0??) and several CTP packs are available. If MS certification carry on their existing policy of certification tracks in step with release versions, there will be a new cert/exam track and even a .NET v4.0 cert will be pretty much out of date on arrival.

Amazon has plenty of good C# books on offer, also the MS certification site lists their approved resources. MSDN and developer blogs are also good for filling in the gaps.

The MCP is a bit of a grey area at present, passing gives you access to the MCP member site, but technically you will have actually taken half of an MCTS cert, official MCP status was awarded on completion of one of the older MCAD/MCSD exams.

The certification tracks are designed for seasoned programmers, if you can't pass the assignments its not a good sign...