After taking (and passing!) MCTS 70-536 - Microsoft .NET 3.5 Framework - Application Development Foundation, I thought I would offer some feedback and advice to anyone who is considering taking the exam.

Self-Paced Training Kit

The book provides you with about 40-50% of the knowledge required to pass the exam; I would suggest that it is best to read the book from the start to finish, then spend extra time on the areas where you have the least knowledge by re-reading the chapter, doing the examples, exploring intelliSense and doing further reading on MSDN about anything you don’t understand or haven’t encountered before. When revising, try to match the amount of time you spend on each section with the percentages indicated here: Skills Measured 

MSDN Library: MSDN Library is your best friend when trying to gain the extra knowledge required to pass the exam. Every time I came across a structure, type, class, method or property I didn’t understand or hadn’t used before I looked it up to find out more.

3rd Party Practice Exams:

MeasureUp produce the practice exams which come with the Self-Paced Training Kit, I found these practice exams helpful initially but the pool of questions was too small and the real exam questions are more complicated than those provided here. However, I have heard that if you buy the MeasureUp online software package they have a higher level of question (closer to the real exam) and use a larger pool of questions.

Exam:

When you feel you are ready choose a local test centre and book with Prometric.

The exam consist of 40-60 multiple choice questions. With only 150 minutes to take the exam, you must get at least 700 marks, out of a possible 1000, to pass.  Each question has its own mark based on its complexity. Your test will get marked automatically at the end of the exam, be prepared for an instant message stating a Pass or Fail.

Below is a list of areas that I found were extensively tested (at least 4-5 questions) and some less extensively tested (at most one question):

Extensively Tested:

• Code Access Security
• User and Data Security
• Threading / Input and Output
• Application Domains
• Serialization
• Globalization
• Types, Collections and Generics

Not Extensively Tested: 

• Regular Expressions
• Graphics

The Future – After Passing the Exam

The benefits of taking this exam are numerous; not only will you achieve an increased knowledge of the .NET Framework, and improve your everyday programming, but you will be learning topic areas that may not be covered in your day job. Plus the extra bonus that it looks good on your CV and you can add Microsoft Certified Professional to your status and email signature!

I would definitely recommend this exam; I hope this information will help you pass first time too!

Here is a problem I found recently, I had a website where the Session Cookies keep getting reset on every page load but it was happening just in IE7 not in Firefox, Safari, IE6 etc.

After a while I found the solution was that I had used an underscore character "_" in the domain (website) name e.g. my_website.localhost
This meant IE7 dropped the authentication cookie when there was an underscore in the domain name (possibly as it can not represent an underscore when it saves the referencing cookie session).

So I changed the domain name e.g. my-website.localhost and now the cookie sessions are fine in all browsers.

This is a weird problem but seems to be considered a general bug with IE7 and domain cookies. Hopefully IE8 will have a fix for this problem.

So for future reference don't use underscores in domain names, or be prepared to live without session cookies in IE7.