Microsoft .Net Framework 2.0 Distributed Application Development: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-529) [With CDROM]

This kit is designed for a developer that plans to take the MCTS exam 70-529. The book assumes that you are comfortable working with the Visual Studio IDE, are familiar with object oriented programming, and have worked with SQL Server. The book is well laid out for someone studying for the MCTS exam. At the time of the writing of this review, this is the only book designed for the purpose of preparing you for the the 70-529 exam. The book is broken up into the following areas. Each area coincides with a main learning objective. * Creating and accessing XML web services * Configuring and customizing an XML web service application * Creating, configuring, and deploying remoting applications * Implementing asynchronous calls and remoting events * Implementing WSE3 * Creating and accessing serviced components and message queuing As well as the book, the kit consists of a practice test engine with a pool of 300 realistic test questions. The CD that the test software is on also includes an e-book version of this book in case you need to travel light. There are 13 chapters with 739 pages of information laid out in a very usable manner. This layout follows the best teaching practice of "tell them what you are going to tell them. Tell it to them. And then tell them what you just told them." This repetitive approach is very good for reinforcing the important concepts. Each chapter starts with the exam objectives and is broken up into lessons which should typically take from 20 to 45 minutes to accomplish. Each lesson develops a topic and usually includes a thorough walkthrough of how you would accomplish a task. At the end of each lesson is a summary, which is an overview of the main points of the lesson. This is followed by a lesson review which includes questions for you to think about and answer. At the end of each chapter is the chapter review, the chapter summary, key terms, case scenarios, and suggested practices. As you can see, the chapters tend to thoroughly cover the material. I had never created and used a web service before, yet I was able to follow the instructions in the first lesson and have one created and configured in less than a half hour. I even learned a few good lessons such as what can happen if you don't change the default namespace before deploying the service. As with any technology book covering a topic this broad with rapidly evolving technologies there were a few inaccuracies. I think most of these issues were changes between versions of WSE and .NET. All in all, this was a well written book that covers a lot of material in an easy to understand manner. If you are planning to take the 70-529 MCTS exam, then you need to get this Training Kit.

This is the only book available (at the time of this writing) for the MCTS 70-529 exam. So far I have taken exam 70-536 using the MS Press books and am preparing to take the exam for this one. I have found the MS Press books to be effective reference books in the work place. I have opened them up many times. The material in this one, like in the 70-536 book cover much of the day-to-day tasks that a .NET developer would need to do at work. The electronic version of the book on the CD-ROM is great! I also thinks that the MeasureUp practice questions were very helpful. The reason for the 4 star rating is that the book is not exactly going to cover the types of things you will be asked on the exam. My suggestion, if you are planning to take the exam, would be to study much of the tasks that it only covers in brief. Do ALL of the examples! Using this book in conjunction with the MSDN website, and the MeasureUp practice exams will be solid preparation for the exam.

Having worked in distributed technologies in mostly Unix based environment for about 15 years and about 2 years in .NET, I thought it is a good idea to see how the technologies compare in both the cross-platform environments. So that was my original motivation to buy this book so I could gain/reinforce my knowledge in .NET based distributed technologies and compare it to Unix cousins. As I kept reading the book, I was bit intrigued and figured may be I should appear for exam for the kicks. I must say they did a very good job of it though there are multiple errors in the book and also in the question bank (for e.g., most of WSE related questions were based on WSE 2.0 as opposed to WSE 3.0). And some of questions were even duplicate. Though at times it was irritating, it did not stop me from making progress, however. Basically, it forced me to refer to MSDN articles and .NET 2.0 documentation. If one wants to be knowledgeable in these technologies, one needs to supplement the information in this book with the following material: 1. Programming .NET Components, 2nd Edition by Juval Lowy -- an excellent book for asynchronous calls, delegates, remoting and security 2. Expert Service-Oriented Architecture in C# 2005 -- excellent book for Web services and WSE 3.0 3. Pro MSMQ (Microsoft message Queue Programming) by Arohi Redkar et al. -- Excellent book for MSMQ 3.0 Of course, nothing to beat hands-on experience as mastering these technologies is not a trivial effort at all. Anways, the exam had 40 questions and about 160 minutes to finish it. Passing score was 700 (I have no clue how they calculate this score). I got a score of 858 though I must admit it was lot of hard work and patience. Yes, I recommend this book as it is the only game in town. I could have rated it 5 stars if they QA'ed the contents a bit more and that is a shame. Good luck with it.

I purchased this book for the certification exam preparation and found it quite useful and worth the cost. Sarah Morgan wrote this book in a typical Microsoft Press certification books style with emphasis on topics along with labs, pointers and multiple choice questions for specific guidelines. In the beginning, author provides the intent of the exam; every exam objective is discussed and referenced with the corresponding section in the book, something unique to this new breed of certification titles. The book starts with the basics of creating an XML Web Service and gradually the level of sophistication in the book increases with topics like "Extending XML Web Services with SOAP Formatting, Custom Headers, and Extensions" and "Configuring and Publishing XML Web Services". In the remoting section, author discusses Creating and Deploying Remoting Server and Client Applications in quite detail in accordance to exam objectives. Further on, Method Invocations and Event Management with .NET Web Services and remoting are discussed in two separate chapters. The final section of the book discusses Web Services Enhancements 3.0 in Client and Server Applications, security, messaging, routing, serviced components and their management. I was hoping to see a Windows communication foundation addendum and extension to the existing distributed communication design however it's not provided. This book is overall an excellent reference to the exam and in my opinion, so far the best available reference book available on this topic in the market.