Over the past week I have taken and passed two certification exams, 70-503: WCF, and 70-529: Distributed Application Development. Rather than take the exams in the .NET framework version order of 70-529 then 70-503 for .NET 2 and then 3.5, I decided to take them in reverse. Here are a couple quick observations of this unlikely certification journey. Hopefully it is humorous:
- After studying all of the way to implement interfaces with WCF, it was much easier to understand what was going in WSE 3.
- Sometimes when working with WSE a few years ago I would scratch my head and wonder why it had to work that way or how round-about some of the exposed APIs were and how difficult it was to get my head around the concepts.
- I am very glad that the WCF bindings and BindingElements are organized so much better than the WSE SOAP Extension Types and Policy assertion types.
- If you do this unlikely certification path, of taking tests from most recent backwards, you can use this approach as a test strategy. 🙂
- During the 70-529 exam, I tried to figure out how the WSE APIs must have evolved in order to be the WCF APIs, and then I could answer the questions based on much more WCF experience. It was a funny endeavor.
Good Luck,
Ben
MS Innovations Blog 
Leave a Reply