I have recently completed and passed the C# 70-483 exam and as such this is my obligatory post of what I found useful while preparing for the exam and a couple of pointers on the exam itself.

Although I have only been using C# in a professional way for a little over a year most of the topics covered in the exam were not new to me. However the depth of which they were covered meant that there was a lot of knowledge that I was missing.

I found that the questions in the exam itself were fairly straightforward but the way they were asked had me questioning the fundamentals of the English language. They were asked in a very pedantic way and as such my one bit of advice would be to take your time and don’t be afraid to mark the question to be reviewed so you can come back to it.

The following are the resources I used before the exam:

  • Programming in C# Exam Ref book from Microsoft
  • MeasureUp practice exams
  • https://mva.microsoft.com/en-US/training-courses/programming-in-c-jump-start-14254
  • Pluralsight for specific topics

I would give the advice that you shouldn’t start with the practice exams until you are fairly close to the exam date. The practice tests use a question bank which you undoubtedly begin to memorize after a while. Passing on some advice that Leon gave me – you don’t just need to know the answer, but why that is the answer.

For future exams the process that I would take would be to watch the jump start video on the Microsoft Virtual Academy to identify the topic areas where I am lacking knowledge. Once identified I would use Pluralsight with the exam reference book to fill those gaps. Finally starting no more than a couple of weeks from the exam I would start to use the practice exams.

As well as the knowledge factor the exam is attempting to test your ‘experience’ so running code samples and trying the different things you are learning to better understand them would certainly be beneficial.