Last week I went to do two of the exams for the MCSD.NET certification. I used to be an MCSD, but I did not bother to do the exams for a few years and they expire. So I'm just an uncertified programmer now (bummer!). I really couldn't care less, but, as the Gold Partner status of my employer (Macaw) depends upon having enough employees with a MS certification, I decided to polish up my certified status and go do some exams (talk about cross-selling).
My experience is that if you work with the technology intensively for more than a year, you can pass the exams without really doing any preparation. Skimming the content through Braindump or doing a test exam from Transcender helps, though.
Now my point from the title: every time I'm doing an exam, there tends to be one question that points me to a feature that I didn't have a clue about. Last monday, I did the exams 70-315 and 70-316 and the most interesting feature brought to my attention was this:
In a WinForms app, when you want a shortcut key to set the focus on a specific text input box, you can actually set this up through the label of the text box. I knew this feature from the menuing system ,but apparently Label supports the same stuff. You set the Text property of your Label to “Date of &Birth”. The ampersand in the text will appear as “Date of Birth”. Now you set the UseMnemonic property of the Label to true. The Label will now trigger to the keyboard event for the Alt-B key. When Alt-B is pressed, the Label will set focus to the next control in the Tab sequence (so you wire the label and textbox together through their tab index).
If you do WinForms all the time, this is probably veeery old news, but to me as a WebDev this was totally unheard of. You client guys are sooo spoilt. ;) Well, I passed with around 900 points anyway, so I guess you don't really have to know this.