I've been looking at doing some form of Microsoft Certification over the last couple of days. The certification I would like to acheive is MCPD Enterprise Application Developer 3.5.
The most appealing route is to take a 14 day residential course (That's 14 consecutive days with 12 hours study per day + evening reviews with a tutor...) The cost is around £5,300 (+ VAT) including the course, exams, accomodation, food etc. You can do a lot of skiing for £5,300...
The next choice would be to do the course in stages which would be:
- 70-536 - Application Development Foundation
- MCTS: ASP.NET Applications
- MCPD: ASP.NET Developer 3.5
- MCTS: .Windows Forms Applications
- MCPD: Windows Developer 3.5
- MCTS: ADO.NET Applications
- MCTS: Windows Communication Foundation Applications
- MCPD: Enterprise Application Developer 3.5
The danger here is not finishing what I begin.
You can see how these 8 exams would take 14 straight days...
Other than the cost (maybe there are some grants available?), the main problem I have is that I can't find anyone in the UK teaching for this certification yet. The 14 day course above is actually for the .Net 2.0 course, which means that I would have to follow up with an upgrade course not long afterwards.
I think my solution is going to be to wait until someone starts providing the 3.5 course. This means I won't have to do a top up course and also means that I have time to save up!!! Whether I do it all at once or in stages depends on how much I save up and how it will fit into my work schedule...