70-504 – Microsoft Certification Exam Preparation Guide I

This post is in sequel to earlier post –70-504 – Microsoft Certification Exam

One full winter has past and its summer again since my last post on 70-504 exam. During this period lot happened, like we saw few millions new posts on workflow foundation forum, heard lot of interesting talks on Mix’08 conference, read news of 70-504 finally launching, and not to forget we observed (and still doing) interesting and never-ending Obama vs. Clinton duel, though that is not our subject today. What I will be talking today will be primarily focused on how to prepare for 70-504 exam. I will not be providing any cheat sheets, instead it will be based totally on analysis of exam material, composition of each part of exam and pointing towards best available resources for preparations.

Okay, so here we go. Following is chart of composition of question in exams. Data for this is fetched from official site of 70-504 Windows Workflow Foundation.

We’ll talk about each section of exam, its short analysis and then I will present few links for further studies.

1. Creating and Hosting Workflows (14%)

With 14% this section is one of smaller sections of exam and basically it has questions on workflow creation and hosting only. Microsoft says it evaluates following skills in this section

• – Create state machine workflows.
• – Create sequential workflows.
• – Select workflow authoring mode.
• – Host a workflow and designer in an application.
• – Initialize and manage the workflow life cycle.
• – Modify a workflow at runtime.

Every good workflow foundation book has workflows, types of workflows, how-to-create-them, how-it-runs stuff in first chapter, so any candidate having some experience of working on workflow foundation, has pretty decent idea about workflow creation, workflow runtime and its execution cycle. Hosting is another important aspect of workflow application and bit of studying/using it can polish your skills for questions related to this topic. I personally rate these 14% weightage questions as easy ones.

Links for preparation

http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/wf/WindowsWorkflowFoundationPart1.aspx

http://aliwriteshere.wordpress.com/2007/03/20/5/

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WF/JumpStartWF.aspx

http://www.codeproject.com/KB/WF/Hostingwwf.aspx

1. Communicating with Workflows (23%)

Second biggest share of questions come from this topic. What is it about? Actually workflow within an application don’t run in isolation, instead often they need to talk to method outside workflow, or raise an event when workflow reaches certain state, or communicate with a web service or expose itself as a web service depending on scenario. This is precisely what this section is about. I personally believe one should have idea of web services (even basic level) before studying this section, and trust me, this is very easily achievable, then one need to learn about different ‘activities’ that are used for communication by workflows, do particularly look at their events, methods and properties. Difficulty level: Medium

Links for preparation

http://searchsoa.techtarget.com/tip/0,289483,sid26_gci1204115,00.html

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms733602(VS.85).aspx

http://dotnetslackers.com/articles/wf/WindowsWorkflowFoundationPart2.aspx

So far so good, rest of sections listed below will be analyzed in subsequent posts, its really late here so lets call it a day. See you soon again, your comments are most welcome

1. Creating and Configuring Custom Activities (25%)
2. Applying Rules and Conditions (13%)
3. Managing Transactions and Compensations (13%)
4. Creating and Managing Runtime Services (12%)

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