ASP.NET 70-515 Exam Preparation points

I’ve written the mentioned exam and completed this in the second attempt. I’ve failed in my first attempt, but passed in the second attempt. The second attempt for all the Microsoft exams is free. One of my friend asked me about the highlight points that helped me to attend the exam. This post arrived while preparation of the bulleted points that I recollect from the exam.

The whole exam pattern can be divided into 3 + 2 = 5 sections. The first 3 sections are more concentrate on the enhancements in v4.0 along with the traditional questions from v3.0 based. The second 2 sections are mainly into configuration and deployment of any web app that is developed using ASP.NET v4.0

To make the long story short, here is the full details that I’ve in my mind. Ofcourse, I’ve not mentioned any thing about MVC as a separate section, because, MVC is a pattern for me but not a new enhancement from the point of framework. Having mentioned that you can even consider that there are few questions pertaining about MVC too, thus, don’t forget to give attention towards MVC.

1) Traditional WebApplication questions

1) How to Configure Web Forms pages 
2) What are master pages and themes 
3) What is globalization

4) What are the page life cycle events

5) How to implement caching and how to manage view-state & Validate user input

2) Questions that are new to ASP.NET v4.0 Controls

6) What are user controls and how to implement 
7) What are the mechanisms using which we can manipulate user interface controls from code-behind

8) What controls help to Display and Manipulate Data 
9) What are the new ways to implement DataBound / DataSource controls

10) Query and manipulate data by using LINQ (ofcourse, this doesn’t new to v4.0 but the exam questions are based on v3.0 LINQ)

3) This section is about new enhancements from ASP.NET v4.0

11) What is Client-Side Scripting and AJAX 
12) How to induce the dynamic features to a page by using JavaScript 
13) How to handle JavaScript events

3.1)Services Enhancements

14) How to create and consume a data service 
15) How to create and configure a Dynamic Data project

4) Configuration Section targeting the production environment

16) How to configuring and Extending a Web Application 
17) How to configure authentication and authorization 
18) How to configure providers 
19) How to create and configure HttpHandlers and HttpModules 
20) How to Configure initialization and error handling 
21) How to reference and configure ASMX and WCF services 
22) How to Configure projects and solutions, and reference assemblies 
23) What are custom routes and how to create controllers & actions

5) Standard Deployment of WebApps

24) How to debug a Web application 
25) How to deploy a Web application

So, if you are attending this exam, please give your self a second study about the above mentioned points. If you are aware of fundamentals of these topics, that’s it you are thru. Happy certification.

IE 8 Beta1 and SL2.0 – Today

Today, I’ve downloaded IE8 beta 1 as well as Silverlight 2.0 installed on my laptop. This day have seen many products released at Mix 08 by great personalities like Scott Guthrie,  Bob Familiar, Guy Burstein, IEBlog, etc. According to Jane Kim at an interview for Mix08, Activities and WebSlices are two of the most exciting new features in IE8.

Apart of IE8.0 and SL2.0, there are other products such as

• Expression Blend 2.5 March CTP
• Expression Web 2 Beta
• Silverlight Tools Beta 1 for VS2008

I’ve downloaded all these .. and am trying out one by one .. what about you??

Increase Web Pages Response time – tip

For the ASP.NET pages that has no user input it is a best practice to have the page register with EnableViewState=“false”. This will increase the response time to 200% of the default.

Along with that, you can also do the one more important is that, anyhow these pages have no user input. Secondly, these will have data that is read-only from database. Thus, you are sure that there is no activity from the user that could be saved onto disk. Perhaps the user might work with the data that is available on the page.

Hence, keeping all the above point in mind, by setting the session’s state to read-only makes the WebPages more effective and the response time increases drastically to about another 200%. Think this and change your web page attributes from the next time onwards

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ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview

The ASP.NET 3.5 Extensions Preview provides a glimpse of new, powerful functionality being added to ASP.NET 3.5 and ADO.NET next year. This release delivers features that enable high-productivity data scenarios and creates the best server for rich clients. The release includes an ASP.NET model-view-controller (MVC) framework, ASP.NET Dynamic Data, Silverlight controls for ASP.NET, ADO.NET Data Services, an Entity Framework runtime, new features for ASP.NET AJAX and a wide variety of API References as hosted at ASP.NET Official site.

You can download the ASP.NET 3.5 Preview, which contain all the Siliverlight controls, ADO.NET Data Services and many more. There is a forum specially dedicated to ASP.NET 3.5 Preview at ASP.NET Forums.