Stand back, I am Certified!
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I just took 070-315 MCP test. Frankly, I was appalled by the level of questions that they had there. I speak here as both a technical guy and as a teacher. I used to be responsible for teaching and educating, and I am familiar with the concepts of good tests.

If I was handed this test for evaluation, even without the technical knowledge to judge the questions, I would have failed it. And question that has the following as answers is fatally flawed...

A) products.Merge(otherProducts, true);
B) products.Merge(otherProducts, false);

And that is leaving aside my own feeling about my own feeling about the whole DataSet / DataTable issue. Asking about the specifics of API in this manner is simply wrong. Especially when it is a boolean parameter. What are they testing, exactly?

Another question had the following query:

"select * from Users where UserId = " + userId

And the correct answer was something along the lines of:

dr.GetInt32(0);

I have so many issues with both question and answer that I don't know even where to begin. Given that I wouldn't hire anyone who tried to give me this code as an answer to a question, I have a lot of issues with this being a question.

Just a few notes:

  • Concatenating strings to create queries.
  • Not using parameterized queries.
  • Using raw numeric indexers to get the data from the query
  • Relying on the DB orderring of the columns.

I never had that much respect for certifications in the first place, but this is really pushing it. If this is the level of the tests, I am going to start putting job ads that says: "Not certified by Microsoft - BIG Plus."

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