Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:  
Summary: Disappointed
Comment: especially the chapter about Web Services Enhancements is so poorly written. Many mistakes, wrong pictures and unexplained examples. Very disappointed.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Doesn't Relate Well to the Exam Priorities
Comment: If you are planning on taking the exam related to this book, you'll need some supplemental materials. It's a little light in some areas that the exam covers closely. There are too many to mention specifically. I'm still in the process of looking for supplemental material to help me pass this exam and learn the material.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Well Structured, but samples has too many errors
Comment: A good book for help to know what is necessary to achieve a good result in microsoft test. But, samples has a lot of sintaxial errors and explanation about each topic is very superficial.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Overall Good Preparation for Exam
Comment: 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.
Customer Rating:
Summary: Useful Reference for the Workplace
Comment: 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.
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