I passed the Microsoft Certification Exam 70-320 (Developing XML Web Services and Server Components with Microsoft C# .NET) today with a score of 968.
This was about different ways of splitting an application into communicating components and getting the components to talk to one another. I'm not sure if this is the right focus. I would have thought a better exam would have been how to design components as more cohesive objects with minimal communication between them. Each time you move data between a component in your system you introduce a risk something will go wrong. The risk is magnified if components go out of process, further magnified if on separate servers and magnified again if servers are at separate locations. There is also a human risk, if someone has not understood exactly what a component does. This is increased if developers are at different locations and can't communicate easily.
See also: Passed Exam 70-300
Passed Exam 70-315
2 comments:
Congratulations on passing 70-320.
I agree with you in that separating components and deploying them onto different nodes can introduce challenges, but this is what this exam is about. It is testing candidate’s knowledge in middle-tier technologies like Enterprise Services and XML Web Services. However this is not suggesting that you need to use them everywhere. It is up to you as an architect, designer or developer to decide where to use them. And obviously you need to take into account the principles of service orientation should you decide to interact with components that belong to other applications. Even within the boundary of a single application, there are times when you need to use one of those technologies (e.g. using Enterprise Services to manage cross resource transactions) although -- I try to avoid them too if I can.
Fortunately Microsoft have taken these issues into account in .NET 2.0 exams. If you look at the preparation guides, you can see that it is testing your logical and physical design skills, so you need to know where to use (or not to use) middle tier technologies and how to configure them.
Thanks Mehran - I agree there are times when you need to use technologies like remoting and web services, and it's important to know how to use them so you can assess their strengths and weaknesses in your particular application.
I started the on .NET 1.0 track before the 2.0 exams were released, and thought it best to follow this and upgrade when I've got a bit more 2.0 experience, but I'm pleased to hear Microsoft have gone down the path of testing both logical and physical design skills.
Post a Comment