I am a Microsoft Certified Professional Developer

Now what else could I have been? I have been doing this damn job for at least 6 years, depending on what you call programming and what not, and even in the worst moments of depression and disappointment I still can't imagine myself doing anything else.

The point is that I have taken the 70-518 exam: Designing and Developing Windows Applications Using Microsoft .NET Framework 4 with 950 points of 1000. The same old story: pointless questions with some ridiculous answers and focus on technologies that nobody has really heard about like Microsoft Sync Framework or using DTOs or planning testing strategies (you only have to know how they are named, though).

Even worse, after getting almost all the questions and answers from the web in the form of a helpful .vce file, I started researching them on MSDN. I really wanted to know exactly what each question meant and why were those the correct answers. I really expected to find tons of documentation from Microsoft about all of this, but no! Not only did I not find what I was looking for most of the time, but when I did it was either obsolete information, meaning there were from 2007 or having specific message on the pages that the information is no longer valid, or formatted in a weird and unfriendly way that was not conducive to any type of training or learning.

Go ahead, try finding documentation on Microsoft Sync Framework, a Hands on Lab or anything that can be read from top to bottom and give you the ability to use that technology. Nada! There is no book for the MCPD exam, not even one that is going to be published in the future. Sure, I can download anything, install it, try it out, google for error messages and fix things up when they don't work, but I would have done that anyway!

I leave this whole experience behind with a vague sense of disappointment. I've learned a lot about WCF and I am going to read Julie Lerman's Entity Framework book now, but none of these four exams did really push me to learn anything new or (something that I feel I deserved from Microsoft) to find the best ways of doing things. It is all a jumbled, bureaucratic mess.