Starting Exam 70-536 Study

I’m taking a little break right now. I got a bit of a burnout, and lack of sleep might have something to do with it :)

The ASP.NET MVC project I had in mind will have to wait a little bit. With a bit of luck it gives me time to find a good graphical designer as well. They seem so rare to find.

What I’m going to do however, is study for a Microsoft certification.

Normally I’m not into degrees. When I graduated, I saw people graduate with the same degree as me who could barely write HTML or C#, at which point I placed no value on the degree people have. I’d rather judge people on what they say and do, which is also the reason I never really bothered with certificates.

But even as a developer, you can’t be blind to the world: certificates matter to non-developers. I admit it’s a nice addition to a resume and leverage when it comes to negotiating your salary, but I’m also starting to see some value in the certificate itself.

When you properly prepare for an exam, without cheating by learning all the questions by heart, it’s actually a good form of self-education. Even when you don’t take the exam in the end, the stuff you pick up while learning the required matter for an exam is valuable.

All these little hidden things you learn about the .NET Framework help to broaden your background knowledge, tiny things which you’d never encounter normally. It makes you aware of all the features .NET offers, and if it only helps you do one thing better, it still helped.

I could disappear for some weeks now to study and not write anything, but that’s not me.

Instead, I’ve set up study notes for note taking and research on the exam itself.

It’s not a tutorial, but I believe it does contain some nice “wow, that’s cool” things.

I’ll keep you updated whenever I finish a chapter, with a small summary of the things I think are cool.