My study guide for Exam 70-487 Developing Windows Azure and Web Services

Developing Windows Azure and Web Services (70-487) is the last exam you need to pass in order to receive the MCSD Web Application, Microsoft’s latest certification for web development. Unfortunately there is no single book that covers the topics in this exam and one of my worries when studying for this exam was how the questions are aligned with the recent changes in the Azure platform. Here I can give you a hint 😉 if you have learned / have experience with Azure in the past or recently you won’t have any problem figuring out the best answer for a question.

If you have already passed the two other exams (70-480, 70-486) this one is going to be a bit more tricky and my recommendation is to carefully review the “Skills measured” section of the official exam page from here.

before continuing I first recommend reading Chris’s blog post “Microsoft Exam 70-487 Study Guide“. He has put together a valuable list of content that you use. If you don’t have enough experience I highly recommend PluralSight videos that are recommended by him.

Another blog post by Tobias, “Microsoft exam 70-487 study guide” in my opinion contains better references, so make sure you don’t miss this one too.

Another blog post by Chris “Microsoft Exam 70-487 Study Notes”

I only want to add my recommendations if you have studied the exam topics and almost ready for the exam.

Accessing Data (24%)

• Know all the technologies that are available in Azure for data storage (i.e. Table storage, SQL Azure, CDN, Caching) and which one is more recommended for which scenarios
• Get yourself familiar with System.Transactions namespace (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/system.transactions.aspx) How transaction works in .NET and how you can use it

Querying and Manipulating Data by Using the Entity Framework (20%)

• Don’t miss Entity SQL Language. Yes you should learn it 😉 (http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb738561.aspx). If you know what is “SELECT VALUE p FROM AdventureWorksEntities.Product AS p

  ORDER BY p.ListPrice” you’re probably safe

• Lazy loading and eager loading, IQueryable vs. IEnumerable (http://channel9.msdn.com/blogs/matthijs/linq-tips-tricks-and-optimizations-by-scott-allen) also recommended by Tobias.
• I also recommend “Eager loading“

Designing and Implementing WCF Services (19%)

• Be sure you know how to use web.config to setup binding, security, etc.
• Get yourself familiar with Web Deployment Packages and learn what are they capable of (e.g. certificate deployment) more here: http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd394698%28v=vs.100%29.aspx

Creating and Consuming Web API-based services (18%)

• How to create Web API service, how to do configurations by code and how to use it in client side (by AJAX)
• let me give you one recommendation here: Know everything and start from here: http://www.strathweb.com/2012/07/everything-you-want-to-know-about-asp-net-web-api-content-negotation/ and go through all the links in Tobias’ blog posts under this topic

Deploying Web Applications and Services (19%)

• I have nothing to add here. Just refer to the other blogs I recommended above.