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For those keeping score, I passed my first Microsoft certification exam. I am now officially a Microsoft Certified Professional! After taking so long to to the first exam, I’m pretty pumped to take more. I used both UCertify and Transcender to prepare for the exam. In the end neither of them fully covered exactly what was on the exam. But I did find that the UCertify prep exams were a bit more helpful because the prep exams provided many more types of questions than did Transcender. I’m just glad to have it over with. I’m now ready to move on to more interesting exams.

On a side note, once certified MCPs are supposed to gain access to an official Microsoft MCP site. You provide you Windows Live ID, your newly acquired MCP ID, and an access code. I received all my MCP ID information a few days after passing the course. So I immediately attempted to log into the site. The process to logging in requires linking your Windows Live ID to your MCP ID. To the company which tried to centralize all login processes with Passport, I’m blown away by how complicated this has been.

I received a few different errors while attempting to log in. The final message I received told me to contact my regional MCP representative and linked me off to some sort of “contact us” page where I could find the rep’s contact information. I explained my problem with logging in and sent off the email. I received a response 2 days later asking for me to provide my “CURRENT” information as well as my “PREVIOUS” information as it existed in their database. I’m not joking, I was asked to send the info as it was in their database. I wrote back and told them that I have no idea how or what info they are storing, but I provided my “CURRENT” information. I also told the not-so-english-speaking rep that I have no idea what “PREVIOUS” information they might have stored, so I could not provide any more details than my “CURRENT” info.

Since then I’ve exchanged numerous other emails, all without resolution to my problem. At one point I was asked to log onto Passport.com and retrieve my “Unique ID”. Apparently my email address, first name, last name, address, and MCP ID have not been unique enough to locate my account information. Finally I was told that it would take 5-7 business days to have my problem fixed. Today is business day 7 since I last heard from Microsoft’s regional MCP representative. I don’t hold out much hope for a resolution today.

Through my career I haven’t seriously focused on getting any certifications. While I always find time to play with and monkey with new technologies I haven’t taken the time to get any official “stamps of approval”, specifically in Microsoft technologies. Not to mention, working as a full-time employee doesn’t give me much incentive to get certified. Once hired, companies seemed to forget how much official training you’ve had.

Once I started as a consultant I was told that certifications, regardless of what or how many, help to start the conversation with potential clients. Certs aren’t necessarily used to prove you understand everything about a particular topic, they are used to help categorize ability and fit within projects. So that I can understand and respect.

So, finally, after all these years I’ve scheduled up my first exam, 70-315 Building Web Applications with C# .Net. Now, no laughing at me. This test is quite old and barely applies anymore. There have been a few newer tests which supersede this one but I’m taking it for a moral victory. I actually began studying for this test 5 years ago. After 7 years of actual development experience with C# and web applications I’m pretty sure I have the skill set to pass. I just need to polish up on the official Microsoft answers.

So May 5th is the day that I hope I will finally pass my first certification exam. Wish me luck