Notes on passing 70-315 exam

I passed the 70-315 exam!

Here are some notes, tips, insight on the experience:

- fixed form exam
- 55 questions
- 120 minute time limit

About 50% were pretty easy, if you studied using a cert exam book (I
recommend using Kalani's book from Que). Example:

You have several ASP.NET applications on one server which will use a
common piece of UI functionality. You want to build only one control
to use among all the applications. What kind of control should you
build?

a. Web User control
b. Web Custom Control
c. ActiveX Control
d. COM Object

The answer is b, which should be obvious.

About 10-20% were seemingly off-topic. There was a question on how you
would create a connection string to access a database on a machine
with muttiple instances of SQL Server.

Other topics I can remember:
- question regarding <system.diagnostic> element in web.config
- a few questions on state management - be prepared to hash out the
differences among viewstate, and various session methods (inproc,
state server, sql server)
- something about setting EnableViewStateMac="false" on page accessed
by server.transfer() and/or execute()
- one or two on caching, notably which to use, vary by param,
fragment, etc.
- xml, as in the best approach to reading xml data

When I started the test, I was immediately hit with a few hard
questions. From there, the questions got easy. By question 30 I
thought I was smooth sailing, with just over an hour to go. Then
things got tough. By the last question I had about 7 minutes left.

The MeasureUp practice exam seemed to most accurately reflect the real
thing. Kalani's book is the best for preparing, but the questions in
his book seem to be a little soft.

I'm hoping I can help others to pass, since I hopelessly scoured the
net looking for tips to pass this one. Now on to the 70-229 exam.....

 

Congrats Joe!
and Good Luck for 70-229.
Your Tips seem quite realistic. I would look forward to rec'g more of these
on this forum.

Cherry...

 

Yeah, Alan, I would say he has. Especially where he goes into stating a
particular question asking about multiple SQL instance connection strings
and other (with code) that came up.

I sometimes wonder how MCP magazine can get away with their exam reviews
too.
There needs to be some documented guidelines about what you can say about
the exam. The lawyers NDA will have us saying nothing but MCP Mag publishes
much more than "nothing".

It sounds as though the example he gave came from the Que book he
recommended.

Plain and simple this was his brain dump of the exam. I cannot see Microsoft
letting this newsgroup supporting this kind of behavior. Sad.

Davin Mickelson

 

I sometimes wonder how MCP magazine can get away with their exam

Let alone the brain dumps and those so called practice test providers.