Customer Reviews

MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-505): Microsoft® .NET Framework 3.5 Windows® Forms Application Development

5 star:		(1)
4 star:		(4)
3 star:		(5)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

If you have little or no existing experience with Windows Forms and want to pass the exam, this is a good place to start learning.

But if you already have experience with Windows Forms, you might be disappointed...

This is effectively a second edition of the book that covered the Windows Forms 2.0 exam (70-526). It seems as though 95% of the content is identical, so I do *not* recommend buying this edition if you already have the 2.0 book.

The authors have only added content for two new topics: 24 pages on LINQ and 3 pages on hosting a WPF control by using ElementHost. But they have missed out some important deployment-related topics that appear on the exam:

1) Install a Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) browser application by using ClickOnce
2) Install a Visual Studio Tools for Office (VSTO) application by using ClickOnce
3) Configure and work with Windows Vista User Account Control (UAC) by using ClickOnce deployments
4) Set appropriate security permissions to deploy the application. This objective may include but is not limited to: elevated permissions
5) Configure Trusted Application deployments
6) Configure security features in an application. This objective may include but is not limited to: Configure code access security, configure the application to work with UAC, configure Windows manipulation permissions, configure appropriate file access permissions for the application, control printing security for the application

So if you have the previous book or you're already experienced with Windows Forms 2.0 then you're better off simply reading Microsoft's free MSDN site. In particular, read the topic titled "What's New in Windows Forms for the .NET Framework 3.5" in combination with Microsoft's official preparation guide for the exam. I wish the authors had!

Along with the other two MS Training Kits I have used (Exam 70-536, 70-502) this book (and the included practice exams) was sufficient to help me pass on the first try. As far as the MS Certification system is concerned, passing any single exam is not going to make you an expert, not going to grant you any inordinate respect among your peers. Nevertheless, there seems to be a cumulative effect, such that the total understanding I have gained as a result of the three exams I have passed thus far is greater than the sum of the three exams considered individually. As someone moving from the Linux world into the MS world, I feel these training kits have been indispensible in helping me with the transition.

I bought this book in hopes of getting a solid understanding of Winforms 3.5. Unfortunately, this book is mostly step-by-step tutorials which really slows down the knowledge transfer (and makes for a large book). I have to go through a 4 page tutorial just to find the 10 lines of relevant code that will be on the test. It would have been better if the relevant code snippets where extracted and explained and the remainder was removed.

I'll keep this short: The book doesn't cover everything, nor does it cover the included topics in depth. However it's strongest attribute is that it's written in a style that keeps the information concise.

The target-audience of the book is a developer who has at least a year's experience in WinForms--so much of the book should be review for you. This book does a good job of being fairly up-front with indicating whether you should be reading a lesson in-depth or skimming over it.

My only warning to readers is that you should at least read the description of *every* Excercise at the end of the lession. The Lesson text doesn't always tell you the list of what the excercises cover, and in some cases (esp. with the very short lessons) the excercises contain additional info that's useful. As always test takers should also pull up the exam guidelines of Microsoft Learning and make sure you are aware of the topics at the time of your testing.

This book is an excellent high-level review / introduction (depending on your experience) of Windows Forms Application development under the .NET Framework 3.5. The topics covered are vast and reasonably detailed, and I felt that it accurately reflected the exam and its requirements. Combined with the training exam to prompt some additional research, the entire kit is very well-rounded.

The book itself has very few typos and no grammatical errors that come to mind. All but one or two examples are completely correct, without any misleading information. Each chapter covers a related set of topics in fair detail - the first half of the book is more of a blitz review of all the controls and events, whereas the remainder covers most details and intricacies quite well. The only topics I felt could have used more coverage were LINQ, WPF (and deployments), and permissions (at least a review of them). While these are each major topics in other books (LINQ in ADO.NET and WPF & security & deployments in WPF), at least a minor review would have been helpful in sorting out some of the details and making things clearer.

Aside from those minor points - which were taken care of with a quick review of some permissions online - the book text is sufficient to pass the exam. The coverage of DataSets may seem cursory, but such detailed functionality is a topic more suited to ADO.NET, not this exam. Again, the coverage suits the exam. The permissions issues tend to revolve around installation and UAC (in Vista) issues that aren't covered or explained thoroughly. Printer permissions are covered quite well, but most others and the tools involved are not and could use more coverage; if the security models from the 70-536 exam are still in your mind, you'll be fine.

The preparation exams compliment the book very well, pointing out areas that need focus and are not examined thoroughly in the book. For example, the book covers various ToolStrip controls and the exams ask implementation-based questions. The same is true of handling events. Many questions in the preparation exams are very close in substance or intention to the real exam questions. I recommend iterating through the exams several times - more and more interesting or obscure questions will surface as you take them, most of which will prompt a little reading. The one glaring issue I draw with the exam is that it asks how to handle thread exceptions and claims that the AppDomain.UnhandledException event can handle them - this is false, as a little reading on MSDN will show.

In all, I feel this book continues well with most others in giving readers another piece of Microsoft's grand .NET Framework 3.5 programming model. Understanding how rich Windows Forms Applications can be and how to use them is very important, even in the days of WPF. This ties together some of the pillars of .NET 3.5 and provides what I feel to be very good coverage of the topics - more than enough to improve your applications.

This edition of the Self-Paced Training Kit for Windows Forms 3.5 is not a comprehensive or as well written as the ones for some of the other .NET 3.5 certification exams. After taking the exam, there seems to be important topics just totally skipped in this book and in other parts, it jumps straight to a step-by-step example with no text to go into the depth of the topic that you would need to answer the questions on the certification exam. The Windows Controls and Windows Controls Deployment topics were especially bad, with the usability topic area coming up right behind those two. I have used the Self-Paced Training Kit for every other .NET 3.5 exam and it has worked well to prepare me for the certification exam. This one unfortunately did not. Too bad at the current sale price, the practice questions and discount certificate probably make the purchase worthwhile on their own, so the publisher won't get the proper feedback from reduced sales volume that the poor quality of this book deserves. Note: Since the Kindle edition doesn't include the practice tests or the discount certificate, while the CD (or DVD I forget which) included with this book contains a digital copy, I would not recommend the Kindle version at all.

Most of the questions on the test are on material not covered in this book. My advice is get 2 to 3 more books on this subject.

While certainly not a comprehensive reference on .NET 3.5 Windows Forms development, this book is an adequate introduction to the material to begin studying for the 70-505 exam.

Each chapter presents a different section of the Skills measured for the exam. These are broken into easily understandable lesson text followed by lab exercises. This combination leaves the reader with a functional understanding of the material that can be built upon by further software development and referencing the Microsoft material online.

I find this approach advantageous because the concept oriented chapters provide a structure to include some best practices, performance, and maintenance topics that are often missing in strictly task or reference oriented documentation.

After passing the exam, this book is still a good reference for reviewing skills that aren't generally utilized in one's day to day programming activities.

Although the book is a good start to prepare for the exam, I think it is not comprehensive enough to be the only resource used.

So I took the 70-505 exam 2 days ago. This book was my chief resource in prep, and I passed.
The book is largely well-written and mostly free of typos.

I have a few guidelines based on my experience. Here's what I wish I'd known:

1) Do the "labs". Yes, sit down and type the code in by hand. Particularly in the data access chapters, the "text" is a few pages, and the real usefulness of the chapter is contained in the labs. Besides, seeing for yourself what happens when you click a button in a wizard is the only way to really get what's going on. The data connection/query code is repetitive, but after the 3rd time you type it you will nail any question about what it has to contain.

2) Don't wait until the day before the exam to fire up the practice test software. I like to pretty much prepare and then take the practice test to see how I can expect to do. There is a lot of material (especially around deployment) that is on the test that isn't covered well in the text. If you are going to get that kind of abrupt wake-up, it is better to have it a week before the test than the day before (or, heaven forbid, during) the actual test.

3) Take a look at Microsoft's site for the actual percentages of topic importance for the test. Plan to do some additional work on the areas that are not emphasized in the book. Two areas that are given pretty heavy weight are deployment, and its associated security. The coverage in this book's deployment chapter is NOT remotely adequate on this area. This is one area where the practice tests are an indicator that you've missed something important. Even following the practice test's links into MSDN didn't give me enough material to feel comfortable with what the exam hit me with. I plan on doing some additional work on this, to make sure I really understand it for real life.

Overall, it's a pretty good book and a good foundation for the exam. However, if you want to feel comfortable and nail the test, plan on adding some study material in addition to this book.

Overall the book has a lot of great information and I learned a lot.

However, for exam prep, there were a lot of details on the real exam that were not covered in the book. For example, chapter 15 in the book barely touches the topic of "Configuring and Deploying Applications", which is 15% of the test. The practice exam CD did have some better coverage of it. Other areas not covered were the System.Threading.Monitor class, ThreadPool, TransactionScope, not enough details about WPF to prepare for the questions, and many others.

The book has many typos and errors - sometimes it was errors as simple as misspellings and other times it was answers in the chapter review that conflicted with the chapter material. On the practice exam CD there were some errors too, like some of the answer explanations seem to have been mixed up and didn't apply to the question. I worry about all the errors I didn't catch and was misled by. (Note: in elementary school I got points taken off for misspellings and errors; why has it become acceptable for professional products to lack he basic quality of being proofread??)

I was incorrect in thinking that since this is a Microsoft Exam Prep book it would have sufficient coverage for the exam. Other sources I used to study for the 70-505 exam were:
- I had an old version of a book from a different company that filled in some of the holes called "MCAD/MCSD Training Guide (70-316): Developing and Implementing Windows-Based Applications with Visual C# and Visual Studio.NET".
- The Kaplan Self Test practice exam had better answer explanations and was worth the money. Although not as bad as Microsoft, it has spelling errors too.
- Practicing in Visual Studio is always good for these exams.
- The Microsoft online documentation is detailed and useful, especially for filling in the holes missed in Chapter 15. I recommended whenever you come upon something new in one of the practice exams, browse through the Microsoft documentation to learn about the class, method, or property.