The exam 70-483 (Programming in C#), https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-70-483.aspx, was released a long time ago. Just recently I started to look into possibilities for professional certifications (mainly because it was requested by my employer). My final goal will be the MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solution Developer) certification https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/mcsd-certification.aspx. Part of this certification path is the mentioned exam. In the short post, I will explain my experience with the exam.
I am using C# on a daily basis and in my opinion, this should be enough to take this exam. Nothing else on top of it is needed.
Actually, Microsoft is expecting that the ones taking the exam have between one and three years of working experience with the language. There is nothing more on top of this, it is just mentioned in the section “Who should take this exam?” and also on the exam survey during the real exam.
First about the preparation.
After looking into the exam homepage you will figure out that the only official book is the “Exam Ref 70-483: Programming in C#” by Microsoft Press. Somehow, I managed to find the first edition as a PDF file in GitHub and I decided to stick with it. The PDF reading was enough for me. There is a newer edition of the book but the changes seem to be really cosmetic and minor. Since the exam is really an old one, there was an update document on the exam homepage which is containing information what has been changed. I assume that the second edition of the book is reflecting the new exam requirements.
The second thing I did was to buy the Microsoft Official Practice Test which can be added to your purchase when you reserve a seat for the exam. The test includes 154 questions and it is a very close simulation to the real exam. In my opinion, many of the questions in this test are with higher-complexity from the ones on the real exam. Anyway, I carefully trained all the questions and used the official book (the PDF I found) as a reference point to find answers and explanations. The official book has also questions which can be used for additional training. Every objective chapter has 3 questions. All in all, I have made more than 200 exam questions.
This is not all. There is another book (not official) published by Wrox: MCSD Certification Toolkit (Exam 70-483): Programming in C#. I found it too late but it seems that it has additional free material which provides a lot of sample exam questions.
If you have followed until here and you have made all the preparation questions, you probably trained more than 300-350 individual test questions and this is a lot. On the exam, I got precisely 46 questions for 120 minutes and most of them were two-three times easier than the exam preparation questions. By the way, I took “at home” exam option and this saved a lot of time. Just make sure you read carefully what is allowed and not allow for this type of exams.
My conclusion is: seasoned C# developers with a couple of years of experience should take the exam immediately. You don’t need additional preparation nor advises. The absolute maximum for preparation for such an exam should be a weekend and nothing else. Everyone else – good luck. There is plenty of materials – the books, the official questions and plenty of MSDN documentation pages explaining the core concepts.
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