Today I passed my first Microsoft exam ever, the 70-541: Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0, Application Development.

In preparation for the exam I found the Inside Microsoft Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 book and the Windows SharePoint Services 3.0 SDK to be the best study materials. In addition, I looked to others for tips and tricks.

I found the SDK to be supprisingly thorough, compared to the book, which doesn’t cover the entire curriculum. The book alone does get one enough points to pass the exam, though.

Overall the exam questions could benefit from a review for verbosity and clear wording. Also, one question was about the RegisterHiddenField method and the RequestFromAdminPort property, which MSDN marks as obsolete. Another question was about adding a column to a content type and pushing the change to a list based on the content type. On that question I could’ve sworn that two of the possible answers were correct.

Nonetheless, learning SharePoint with a specific goal and deadline in mind serves as a good motivator.