Well I took the 70-330 Beta security exam today. I was pretty poorly prepared with short notification of it’s availability (and this afternoon was the cut-off time to take the beta) with no ability to invent much time to focus on prepping. I had almost cancelled, but decided to bite the bullet, cram as much as I could and take it.

Horrors! It was hard and gruelling. I think I am a really bad test taker for one. I found myself often reading the convoluded twisty questions (this is not new to MS cert tests from all I have heard over the years) more than once since I had a hard time just focusing on them.

Being a beta this was a long test.

There was nothing in there that I was unfamiliar with but I think my broad understanding of concepts far exceeds my ability to memorize lots of complex syntax.

However, the time spent was not a bust. In my cramming effort, I touched on a lot of .net security stuff that I hadn’t worked with yet and found Keith Brown’s awesome book. I may not be able to code it blind, but I do think I know when I would use which piece of security and what to look for in the documentation to drill into enough to excecute my code and my ideas properly. This is a much greater value to me than the certification. Besides, my certain miserable failure will probably help lower the bar and make the final structure of the test a little easier.

This won’t however, stop me from taking some of the tests cold for 1/2 price at TechEd – the ones that are on things I do and use every day.

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