Microsoft Silverlight 4 Certification, is it worth the ride?

Now some good news folks: I received the confirmation that I successfully passed the Silverlight 4 Microsoft Certification.

I was too busy to immediately brag about it and write a show-off post so I will here just quickly share my thoughts on how all this went before my brain moves these impressions to non-accessible-memory-banks-prepared-for-deletion.

First of all I must admit that I was pretty sceptical about the whole certification thing. I’m not big fan of certifications in general and I find it a bit overrated – who cares about fancy printouts people are framing on their walls. You either know how to do your job or you don’t and some poster with Microsoft stamp on it wont change that in any way.

But at that time (it was 3 months ago) Silverlight 4 Exam was beta test (you could take it for free) and in that period of time I was switching my corporate job to become a full time Silverlight developer so this seemed like perfect opportunity to test my knowledge – and I applied.

Honestly I did not had enough time to prepare for the test – even though I was planning to do so. Simply could not find the time or strength to study and eventually I had to go for a test without any especial preparations – all I had was my hands-on experience in writing Silverlight code and few books I have read on the subject along the way.

Naturally I expected lots of theory mumbo-jumbo in the test so I was sure I will fail-fast 🙂

But to my surprise the test was mainly pragmatic with questions from real-world Silverlight programming practice so it turned out I did pretty good after all.

It was interesting that some parts of the test required knowledge of MVVM pattern – just as if they asked me what to put there 😀

All in all test turned out to be more serious and realistic than I expected so this is +1 for old Microsoft.

In case any one of you want to take the test and don’t know how to prepare I have two things I could recommend:

1. read THE book: Pete Brown’s Silverlight 4 In Action – Its the best Silverlight book I have read so far and covers most of the knowledge needed for the exam.
2. Mark Monster also participated in the Beta Silverlight 4 testing and blogged about how he was preparing for it so this is also worth reading.

All in all this was fun ride, and now I’m looking forward to Silverlight 5 Certification announcements 🙂