Ratko Ćosić - lamentations of one programmer

Howdy folks! Merry Christmas and happy and successful new year!
I have completed the second 3.5 exam in a row, and I'm ready to hit the road with new materials (after I recover from Christmas holidays).

Passing score: 964/1000
Exam difficulty: medium

Some of the key points measured by Exam 70-503:
- WCF's ABCs (address, binding, contract) - heavy covered - lots of questions including proper coding of configuration file and imperative coding, parameters; multiple endpoints for one service, initializing services, predefined WCF bindings, etc.
- contracts - which type to use when (Service, Operation, Data, Message), message pattern design,
- custom-made service host, channel factory, behaviors (service, operation,
- installing and creating WCF services, proxy generation,
- hosting on different platforms - majority on IIS; also NT services as host,
- Windows Activation Services (WAS), options on IIS and web-specifics,
- serialization - couple of questions - attributes,
- FaultContract, handling exceptions on the client and the server,
- WCF tools - SvcConfigEditor, SvcTraceViewer; message logging, tracing,
- performance counters, WMI, custom-made counters,
- WCF security - questions about roles, credentials usage, transport and message-level security options,
- federated security model, authorization, Windows CardSpace,
- reliable messaging, MSMQ, transport channels, queues (dead, poison queue), integration channels,
- couple questions regarding transactions, KTC (Kernel Transaction Coordinator), LTM, DTC,
- pay attention to questions including mix of different kind of technologies, such as: WCF+WF, ASP+WCF, etc.

Remark: I've just read an article on how the SOA is dead and will be replaced with somewhat better appliance of server-side technology, and I'm totally dissapointed. Well, there is some indulgencies and misuses of the SOA but there should be more evidence about its business lack of trust... We'll see...

Go back to How-To's for 3.5 Gen Exams