Thoughts On Just-Completed BizTalk 2006 Beta Exam
Hopefully I don't get read the riot act, but I just finished taking the beta
BizTalk 2006 exam and wanted to share some thoughts.
First of all, it's 72 questions, VERY heavy on business rules and BAM. Also lots of scenarios revolving around trading partners. Plenty
of questions surrounding messaging-only solutions. Also, saw a number of transaction-focused questions. In terms of what's new for
2006, expect to see lots of "application" and deployment questions, I saw a SEED mention in there, taste of recoverable interchanges, and
more than a few questions on the BAM alerting.
All that said, I really didn't like this test at all. Whereas I recall the BizTalk 2004 exam to be fairly practical and based on
quasi-realistic scenarios where actual BizTalk knowledge was being tested, this BizTalk 2006 exam seemed to revert to the old MCP exam style of
providing vague, half-explained scenarios and then providing tricky answer choices of which any number could be justified as "correct." For instance,
there were questions revolving around BAM views and setting alerts for certain recipients to receive. When the answer options are something like
(a) enable alerts, (b) create subscriptions, (c) create alert, etc, I can make cases for each one of those to be correct in some way.
On one of my first questions, the actual code snippet appeared to be incorrect. The code was passing in the business rule policy name
and version as part of a single input string to the Policy object constructor. Unless that's a hidden one, I usually use Policy(policyName,
majorRevision, minorRevision).
So that last paragraph was probably more negative then I've been for like 9 months, but I just came into the test with high hopes and
expectations, and left quite frustrated. While I'm confident I passed, and judiciously used the "comments" feature to register
constructive feedback, it just seems that the spirit of the BizTalk 2004 exam didn't transfer to this test. Now some of the questions
were pretty good, but my personal opinion is that the test was more concerned with throwing tricky questions out there than actually
evaluating my core BizTalk knowledge. Discuss.
Technorati Tags: BizTalk
Comments
- Anonymous
June 02, 2006
My thoughts exactly. I also took the exam this morning and found it to be very heavy on BAM and Business Rules (which I know almost nothing about).
I think it was also a little on the tricky side. My example would be one of the questions where they were asking where you would put an exception handler for a specific exception. With the options they gave you and the vagueness of the questions, you could easily make the case for at least two of the answers. I understood exactly what they were trying to ask, but the way they asked it made it very hard for me to give them the correct answer.
I really doubt that I'll pass based on the percentage of BAM/BRE questions, but it was nice to get a first look at the exam for free. :)
Note: I also think one of my questions had some incorrect data either in the orchestration view or in the answers, because I knew what they were trying to do but it was impossible to do by selecting three of the answers they gave. - Anonymous
June 02, 2006
Hey Bryant. Great point. I didn't mention that, but I clearly felt for the overwhelming majority of questions that I couldn've answered them better free form, rather than try to pick from the options provided. I knew the answer, but none of the choices matched ;) - Anonymous
June 02, 2006
Good to know that some of the Microsofties dont approve of the questions that are in the exams conducted by MS. I have found some of them to be very impractical. - Anonymous
June 03, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 04, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 05, 2006
Good post - I passed the BizTalk 2004 exam and was looking forward to testing my knowledge of 2006. Instead the BAM business rules bias ruined it for me. Very little in the exam related to the day to day problems/issues I encounter. - Anonymous
June 05, 2006
Thanks All,
I know this will be great help to clear this exam BTS 2006, but the same time I felt bad to know that BTS 2004 exam flavor has gone from the BTS 2006 exam.
Let's See... I'm taking exam tomorrow[06-06-06], I will post my views tomorrow after the exam.
Thanks again,
Hemant Bhadane
lucky_hemya@yahoo.com - Anonymous
June 05, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 06, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 06, 2006
Hey Sam, I agree with your BAM assessment. I love BAM and the BRE, and didn't mind that the test skewed that way, my issue was with the type of question, not the subject matter. I certainly agree that if you don't understand basic BAM and Rules, then you haven't reached the apex of BizTalk knowledge. - Anonymous
June 06, 2006
Having also done BizTalk 2004's exam, I agree with most people: the quantity of BRE+BAM questions was unexpected, and I found the BAM questions badly written, in defficient english. While not being a native english speaker, I am fluent, and some questions just didn't quite seem to make sense.
I was surprised that more everyday basic biztalk skills, for example in messaging, schemas, maps and adapters (which are totally absent) weren't evaluated, as well as essential orchestration shape stuff. - Anonymous
June 22, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
June 23, 2006
Hey Dwight, thanks for the thoughtful comments. I personally had no problem with the quantity of BAM/BRE questions, just wanted folks to know their prolific nature on the test.
I also need to remember that this was a beta test, and that questions I found particularly arbitrary or misleading have a good likelihood of not making the final test. I'll have to take the released exam just to be sure!
As to the exam content, I thnk to some extent, you've helped proved the way I feel about it. While the BTS 2004 exam felt like it was written by the product team and/or field folks, the BTS 2006 exam felt like it was written by people who write exam questions for a living. Nothing wrong with that, but definitely gives two distinct flavors. - Anonymous
June 23, 2006
No, thank you for your comments, they proved very valuable both during the beta process, and now.
BTW, You were correct in your assesments/comments, it was a beta exam, and based on your feedback, and others the MS Learning group is going to determine which questions make the final cut and which ones that don't. What's going to be interesting is to see what the final passing score will be. - Anonymous
June 28, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
July 06, 2006
Shall we get the Beta Exam Results atleast by this week????
From the desktop of...
Saravana Kumar - Anonymous
July 06, 2006
Your guess is as good as mine. - Anonymous
July 20, 2006
The comment has been removed - Anonymous
July 20, 2006
Hey there Duncan. I actually just got the email message yesterday saying that I did indeed pass. I can now sleep in peace. - Anonymous
July 24, 2006
PingBack from http://blogs.sqlxml.org/bryantlikes/archive/2006/07/24/6763.aspx - Anonymous
August 02, 2006
Congrats!!! To All, and thanks for the comments... - Anonymous
August 16, 2006
I passed this exam but also felt it was extremely raw. Quite a few poorly formulated questions and options. Sometimes I had to read them through again and again to cut to the point and guess what they meant. I sprinkled my answers with comments hoping feedback will improve exam in the final version.
Another questionable thing is the place of this exam in the new Microsoft certification path. My view on this issue is expressed here http://geekswithblogs.net/paulp/archive/2006/07/19/85741.aspx - Anonymous
August 16, 2006
Good feedback, thanks Paul. - Anonymous
August 18, 2006
PingBack from http://blogs.sqlxml.org/bryantlikes/archive/2006/07/24/YAC-2D00-BizTalk.aspx