Thoughts On Just-Completed BizTalk 2006 Beta Exam

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Hopefully I don't get read the riot act, but I just finished taking the beta
BizTalk 2006 exam and wanted to share some thoughts.

First of all, it's 72 questions, VERY heavy on business rules and BAM. Also lots of scenarios revolving around trading partners. Plenty
of questions surrounding messaging-only solutions. Also, saw a number of transaction-focused questions. In terms of what's new for
2006, expect to see lots of "application" and deployment questions, I saw a SEED mention in there, taste of recoverable interchanges, and
more than a few questions on the BAM alerting.

All that said, I really didn't like this test at all. Whereas I recall the BizTalk 2004 exam to be fairly practical and based on
quasi-realistic scenarios where actual BizTalk knowledge was being tested, this BizTalk 2006 exam seemed to revert to the old MCP exam style of
providing vague, half-explained scenarios and then providing tricky answer choices of which any number could be justified as "correct." For instance,
there were questions revolving around BAM views and setting alerts for certain recipients to receive. When the answer options are something like
(a) enable alerts, (b) create subscriptions, (c) create alert, etc, I can make cases for each one of those to be correct in some way.
On one of my first questions, the actual code snippet appeared to be incorrect. The code was passing in the business rule policy name
and version as part of a single input string to the Policy object constructor. Unless that's a hidden one, I usually use Policy(policyName,
majorRevision, minorRevision).

So that last paragraph was probably more negative then I've been for like 9 months, but I just came into the test with high hopes and
expectations, and left quite frustrated. While I'm confident I passed, and judiciously used the "comments" feature to register
constructive feedback, it just seems that the spirit of the BizTalk 2004 exam didn't transfer to this test. Now some of the questions
were pretty good, but my personal opinion is that the test was more concerned with throwing tricky questions out there than actually
evaluating my core BizTalk knowledge. Discuss.

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