Okay, so I’ve been sent out to consult with various “potential” customers about Sharepoint 2007 replication ya-de-dar-de-dar, and decided that ,while I’ve developed a few MOSS solutions since SharePoint 2007 replaced it’s awkward predecessor (Sharepoint Services 2003) including web-parts and event handlers, I really ought to get myself certified to talk about this stuff confidently. It was time to bite the bullet and prove it the Microsoft way..ew… Last Friday, I passed exam 70-542 which apparently makes me a MCTS Microsoft Office Sharepoint Server 2007 application developer, a title so long and meaningless its hardly worth wasting the space on a CV for it. Regardless, the certification is nice to have.

Studying for this exam wasn’t easy, while the study guide is there, good material is hard to find on the web. So I decided to write up my study notes for the purposes of future poor souls who wish to sell themselves to Microsoft’s SharePoint world domination plan.

The exam itself consists, almost entirely, of multiple choice questions. You will usually be required to select one answer from a possible four (using radio buttons), in some instances you may be asked to select two answers (using a selection items/tick boxes), and in at least one case you will have to drag and drop possible answers from the left side of the screen to the right in the correct order. The exam currently consists of about 55 questions, and you need to get about 70% correct to pass.

So, what’s in it? Obviously I can’t remember; and I wouldn’t tell you even if I could. But I can give you what I simply couldn’t find, a comprehensive write up of study notes that are a little more guided torwards actually having a chance at passing honestly.

Books

I bought the Professional SharePoint 2007 Development (Programmer to Programmer) book by Wrox press. (Amazon.com link)
It covers most of what is on the 70-542 exam but seems a little light on some areas such as Single Sign on (Hint: The exam is fairly light on this too).

What you need to know

Regardless of your expertise with SharePoint, allocate yourself a good amount of time to study. If you follow the study guide thoroughly you’ll need to brush up on allot of skills, so make sure you have the hours free!

• Document Policies

Study up on custom document policies, what they are, when you need them, and how to create them eg:

Public class MyPolicy : IPolicyFeature

If you don’t know, find out what Policies can do out of the box and how it can be extended.

A good web resource seems to be Tom Stegeman’s blog which covers the subject well.

• Record Management

Get an idea of what records are, how to set up a Records Center and when it is appropriate.

Keep in mind stuff like legal holds, it is on the study plan and you will need to know when a legal hold could be used and for what purpose.

Take another look at Tom Stegman’s blog for a good write up on record management.

• Content Management

A broad subject this one. Yet don’t dwindle on this too much, the questions you will get on this are fairly logical and you should be able to eliminate incorrect answers if you take your time.

Obviously the study guide mentions being able to extend the page authoring toolbar. There is an article on the subject here. Worth a read, but don’t do what I did and dwindle on the AuthoringState stuff – probably worth familiarising yourself with the XML instead.

The study guide mentions modifying layout and content and using content placeholders. Know what this means, and think about when it might be useful.

There is some good stuff on custom field controls in the above mentioned book, but you should be able to find everything you need to know on the web. Learn what you can inherit a custom field control from and why.

• Content Deployment

I struggled a bit with questions concerning content deployment between MOSS sites. But if you read something like this you probably won’t go wrong. (Hint: know what a portal template is and when it is used, also know something about how to upgrade templates on a target server)

• Variations

The knowledge is out there, know the basics.

• Excel

You should certainly know about filtering data in Excel workbook, at the very least know that you can.

Read through the MSDN pages on Excel Services, it’ll only take you about half an hour tops.

Know what a trusted workbook location is and when to use it.

UDFs (User defined functions) will come up, make sure you know how to define one in your chosen language (C#/VB) here is an article that should set you up just fine for the exam.

The study guide mentions the ‘Report Viewer’, but you are expected to know about the Reporting Service as a whole.

• Key Performance Indicators

Obviously know what they are and when to use them. An article like this would be good reading. (HINT: It would be helpful to know something about making data connections from KPI lists too)

• Business Data Catalogues

Yes, they come up extensively! This should be obvious from the preparation guide.

A good place to start might be here

You’ll really benefit from knowing about the BDC definition format, I went through the examples here. Pay particular attention to the XML and know how to define entity vs methods. Make sure you know the difference between a Finder and Specific Finder method. Know about filters (Essentially all the stuff mentioned on the prep guide about BDC application definitions is important).

This is also when the IDEnumerator will come up, make sure you know when its used.

• InfoPath forms

The study guide says “Display an InfoPath Form from within an ASP.NET page by using the Form Services Control”,  so read through this page and pay special attention to what you need to do to get the form to dispaly on an ASP page. Where does the XSN/XML file get added and so on.

..Yes find out about Form Services (in the same article)

• Single Sign-On (SSO)

It would have been so helpful if I’d known where to look before I took my exam, there isn’t much about this in the book, but if you have a rough idea of the basics in that article it should see you through.

• Document Converter

Sigh…Don’t waste your time

• User Profiles

Read up on the API ensure you know what the code looks like, because you will be looking at code snippits in this exam. What it says in the study guide “Display a user profile retrieved from a…Web Service” is essentialy the kind of thing you’ll be looking at.

• Search

Lots on this,but mostly related to BDC Definitions as far as I recall.

This is a good place to start but lacks a good example of the XML for the search results web part. So you might want to look at doing the following in Search Center:

1. Go to the search results page
2. Go into Page Edit Mode
3. Find the ‘Search Core Results’ Web Part on the page

Make sure you are familiar with the kind of XML that can be edited for the Search Core results page. What kind of fields are there.

Keyword queries will come up. Behold

• Audiences

Start here and revise what you can. Play careful attention to the API and learn the basics of the AudienceManager and what you can do with it. You won’t be asked to know any more than the basics, so look at some code examples of getting members and so forth. Try writing a few snippits for yourself.

• User Profiles

This kind of thing might be helpful, another one of those “get used to the API” things.

Other resources

If you have the time, you should try to read all the visual how tos from the MSDN site, they will really set you up for this exam. If you book your exam in, say, a months time you can read one a day!

Finally, my exam tip

Mark every question “for review”, at the end of the exam use the “review marked” and go through all the questions again.

If you are confident that you will never change your answer on a question, unmark it for review. At the end, use the “review marked” and do it again…keep doing this until you are left with only a small subset of questions you are unsure about and try to go through them carefully and logically until you are sure that the selection you made is to the best of your available knowledge the correct one.