Passing that Bear

I passed (barely) my first Microsoft Certification exam this week. Reading Derik Whittaker’s blog post on the course did offer a warning of the difficulty of what expect. He also talked about XML Serialization and presented a good DimeCast on the subject. As different as .NET was from the previous C++_ and COM technologies, it gradually proved to provide good backward compatibility. So I was kind of looking forward to having a “Core .NET”exam under my belt. When you look real close you see that having a single broad-based .NET exam is really unmanageable.There are simply too many areas to cover.The exam also becomes somewhat of an API bee that intellisense can easily answer once you are familiar with a particular area of the framework.

I know the exam has been around for a while but in 2010, with .NET 4.0 around the corner the exam seems pretty dated. The emphasis on Code Access Security is particularly hard to prepare for, in light of .NET 4.0s make CAS obsolete. Localization was a topic of no applicability for me, but I can accept its inclusion. Using COM libraries from .NET remains useful but bothering to master exposing .NET code for COM consumption doesn’t seem essential to me.

Another bone I had to pick with the exam was coverage of some of the more obscure extensibility points for .NET.Building a Custom CultureInfo class for localization is too esoteric. As valuable as the topic category of reflection is, I question the general need to create assemblies on the fly, such as using the AssemblyBuilder class. If one does need to create code or even assemblies on the fly, there are much better regarded APIs available outside the FCL, such as Cecil.

Another topic covered that I have to question was the introduction to GDI+.The coverage was just a drop in the bucket of possible coverage.I would suggest excluding this topic.This especially true since GDI+ is officially not supported with ASP.NET.I actually wish GDI+ were supported for ASP.NET, particularly for its very useful image conversion functionality. Scott Hanselman just posted on his successful usage of GDI+, even though it is unsupported for ASP.NET. Hopefully he can find out why it remains unsupported!