TFS MCP Exam 70-510

Today, I passed the MCP Exam 70-510 : Visual Studio 2005 Team Foundation Server. A while ago I made a commitment to do the exam anyway : prepared or unprepared. Well, yesterday evening I felt some pressure because I was somewhere in the middle. On the one hand I'm using Team Foundation Server for quite some time now and I should already have learnt a lot of advanced features + tips and tricks on-the-job, but an exam still requires some extra (theoretical) knowledge of topics you haven't practiced a lot or not at all. So I decided to browse the MSDN pages on TFS a bit to improve my TFS weaknesses and it turned out to have pulled me through! There you can find interesting sections for Team Foundation Project Members, Project Leads and Administrators. Exactly the stuff I was looking for!

All this to make clear that you don't need to be afraid of taking exams too early - trust on the skills you've acquired already on-the-job and improve your weaknesses if needed. If I would have failed the exam today, I would now have known what knowledge I still missed to pass the test ... Taking the exam (too) early is certainly a calculated risk if you know that you have a second shot for free. A precise and full preparation for an exam is excellent, but don't let it come so far that you will never take the exam because you will never feel 100% prepared! You sometimes just need to take the plunge and see where you get ...