Exam 70-480

As for a quick update, things have been particularly busy right now for the entire Mack Family. We've been in a state of constant flux lately, both personally and professionally for a little while now. And it's been a little rough on everyone. Professionally, I've been busy working on several projects. I continue to work with Xamarin, on one of my companies first mobile applications to be deployed to the app store, right now specifically for iPhone and iPad. Aside from that project, I've been doing a lot of work with SSIS lately.

For those who don't know what that is, it stands for SQL Server Integration Services. And it's a tool that allows you to build packages to help import and transform data to be added to a SQL database. It is built to utilize tools to help import and work with large volumes of data. Definitely a possibility for a future blog post, and I probably will.

Outside of that, I've been gearing up for a new semester which starts in a week. I am about to kick off my 7^th semester teaching a course called "Development Fundamentals". And I have to tell you, it's definitely something I look forward to. There's something really fun about helping people who are starting out in this field, find the passion that I and so many of my colleagues see in it.

But anyway, I digress. The reason for this post, today I took the first of three exams designed to obtain my MCSD (Microsoft Certified Solutions Developer). I've made the decision to finally pursue mine, and will be doing it in a very short timeframe. I passed my exam today, with a pretty good score, and the exam rated me as strong in all skill categories. I wanted to pass along the resources I had found that helped me to study for the exam.

The following were resources I used:

• Programming in HTML5 with JavaScript and CSS3 training guide: This book can be found on Amazon here. I found this book to be very helpful, and it covered about 90% of the material on the test.
• Microsoft Virtual Academy: I found a video course taught by Mike Palermo and Jeremy Foster that prepares you for this exam. I found that the parts that the book missed, they covered here.
• PluralSight: Another great source is this plural sight course, found here.
• Blogged by Chris Study Guide: Another great post, this one outlines a lot of the different topics that are covered in the exam can be found here.