I passed my last certification exam, 70-300 Analyzing Requirements and Defining Microsoft .NET Solution Architectures this morning. It was a pretty tough exam. I had to read three case studies describing a companys current IT environment, their business objectives or problems, and interviews with stakeholders, and develop a solution going through each phase of the Microsoft Solutions Framework. This, more than any exam, is one that you need to have practical real world experience to really prepare for the exam. My main problem with the exam, and the study materials, is that the questions are very subjective. There were several that I disagreed with because I didn’t think their solution fit the problem, or that you could interpet the business requirements into an alternate data model. There were several times that I had to ignore my inner Architect and answer they way I thought they wanted. I think the main skill for this exam is reading comprehension. I got in the habit of reading the question multiple times just to see if there was another way you could read it.

Now, that I’ve passed and earned my Microsoft Certifed Solution Developer, I’m going to take a break from studying and dive into some side projects that have been laying around waiting for me to finish up. I gotta figure out what this whole .Net 2.0 thing is, and check out why everyone is so excited about SQL Server 2005.

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