70-235 Certified

A few weeks ago I sat the 70-235 exam. Coming from a real-world perspective I wasnt overly impressed with the exam. To me it felt mind numbingly robotic and very 2006 R1 feature set focused (e.g. BAM and BRE). However the exam successfully probed some interesting areas within BizTalk, encouraging me to learn things about BizTalk that I would not otherwise get exposure to.

Patrick Wellink's post "How to prepare for the BizTalk 2006 Exam" concisely summarised how to prepare for this exam. At first I sensed some sarcasm in Patrick's post, but now having successfully passed the exam found his post to be scaringly accurate.

1. Create a nice BizTalk solution
2. Use party resolution
3. Use correlation
4. Send a message to a web-service that requires authentication
5. Use a business rule with a database fact
6. Use business rules that assert and retract
7. Make sure you deploy the solution
8. Run messaages through it
9. See what happens if the orchestrations are not started
10.   See what happens if the rules are not deployed
11.   Remeber the name of each tool you use (e.g. orchestration view in VS.NET)
12.   Know the stages of the pipelines
13.   Finally create a BAM View in excel
14.   Deploy the BAM View
15.   Deploy the tracking profile
16.   See if it works through the BAM Portal
17.   Now modify the BAM view
18.   Update the BAM view
19.   Do some BAM with continuations
20.   Know (memorise) your persistence points