Exam Profile 70-506: Silverlight 4 Development

Date: Sep 17, 2012

This article profiles the 70-506 Silverlight 4 Development exam, for developers wishing to prove their web development skills to prospective employers. Pearson IT Certification provides a variety of exam preparation tools to help our customers in their quest for certification. As part of our service to you, we have developed this Exam Profile series. Each profile is developed based on the testing experience of one of our trainers or authors. You won’t get exact questions or answers, but you will get a real feel for the exam. Each profile describes question forms, trouble spots, hints for exam preparation, and recommendations for additional study resources. Find out what you can expect to see on the exam and how you can better prepare for it.

Microsoft’s Silverlight is widely used to create websites that are rich in multimedia content such as graphics, animation, and interactivity. As such, Exam 70-506 should be on the short list for developers wishing to prove their web development skills to prospective employers.

Exam Details

Number of questions: Microsoft does not disclose the number of questions on their certification exams, but this exam is estimated to contain 50 questions.
Types of questions: Microsoft does not disclose the types of questions that appear on their certification exams, but this exam consists primarily of multiple choice questions. You may also encounter build a tree, reorder, or simulation questions.
Passing score: 700/1000
Time limit: Microsoft does not disclose exam time limits, but the time limit for this exam is estimated to be about two hours.
How to register: Prometric

Trouble Spots

Perhaps the biggest trouble spot on Exam 70-506 is that it is easy to devote all of your study efforts to the more difficult topics and forget that there is some relatively basic material covered on the exam. For example, you will need to know how to arrange content with panels and how to implement controls such as text boxes, buttons, and check boxes. These are easy topics to master, but you cannot overlook them if you want to pass this exam.

Preparation Hints

Probably the best way to prepare for this exam is to take advantage of all the resources that Microsoft makes available to you. For example, Microsoft offers a Silverlight 4 Training Course that you can download for free. This training course contains whitepapers and hands on labs, and it can go a very long way toward helping you to prepare for the 70-506 exam.

Recommended Study Resources

There are several study resources available for this exam. Some of the better ones include:

Getting Ready for the Microsoft Silverlight Exam 70-506

2011 Microsoft Exam 70-506 EXAMETRIX Pocket Notes and Review Quiz

Preparation Hints

Exam Objectives

The exam objectives are broken up into six different categories. The 70-506 exam measures your ability to accomplish the technical tasks listed below.

The percentages indicate the relative weight of each major topic area on the exam. The higher the percentage, the more questions you are likely to see on that content area on the exam.

The objectives for Exam 70-506 as stated by Microsoft are as follows:

Laying Out a User Interface (15%)

Arrange content with panels.

This objective may include but is not limited to: arranging content with panels (grid, stack panels, canvas, border, scroll viewer, ViewBox), managing grid properties (autosizing, star sizing, column definitions, row definitions, gridlines), setting Z order, setting visibility, setting orientation, setting positioning

Implement and configure core controls.

This objective may include but is not limited to: implementing and configuring core controls (textbox, button, text block, checkbox) and content controls, referencing namespaces

Create user controls.

This objective may include but is not limited to: creating user controls, creating control parts, mapping control parts

Implement a navigation framework.

This objective may include but is not limited to: implementing caching on a frame, modifying journal mode, handling navigation events (Navigating, Navigated, NavigationFailed, NavigationStopped), implementing and configuring deep linking

Display collections of items.

This objective may include but is not limited to: implementing and configuring item controls (datagrid, listbox, items control, combo box, tree view), working with selected items and indices

Play media files.

This objective may include but is not limited to: implementing digital rights management (DRM), playing streams, creating timeline markers, playing multiple audio tracks, displaying closed captioning, responding to timeline marker events, handling media playback events

Enhancing the User Interface (14%)

Create or modify control styles.

This objective may include but is not limited to: setting a style locally, setting a style at the page control level, setting a style globally, implementing implicit styles, overriding styles at different levels, creating based-on styles

Create control templates.

This objective may include but is not limited to: creating a template, attaching a template, implementing a content placeholder, implementing template binding

Create or modify data templates.

This objective may include but is not limited to: modifying item templates for data controls, creating a create template, creating an update template, using a user control as a data template

Manipulate visuals.

This objective may include but is not limited to: transforming controls by using skew transformations, rotate transformations, scale transformations, translate transformations, or perspective transformations; applying pixel shaders

Animate visuals.

This objective may include but is not limited to: creating storyboards, programmatically starting and stopping storyboards, implementing easing functions, using keyframes, triggering storyboard on load, repeating and reversing storyboards, setting keyframe begin time, responding to events, configuring bitmap caching

Implement behaviors.

This objective may include but is not limited to: triggering storyboards by using behaviors, dragging and dropping elements, calling a method

Manage the visual state.

This objective may include but is not limited to: creating states, creating state groups, transitioning states, programmatically changing states

Implementing Application Logic (16%)

Handle events.

This objective may include but is not limited to: handling routed events, bubbling events, implementing AddHandler.

Consume services asynchronously.

This objective may include but is not limited to: creating and adding service references, handling asynchronous completed events, configuring service endpoints, handling service exceptions, handling timeouts

Work with background threads.

This objective may include but is not limited to: spawning a background thread to execute code, returning data to the UI thread by using the dispatcher object, implementing the dispatcher timer

Work with dependency properties.

This objective may include but is not limited to: creating dependency properties, specifying dependency property metadata, getting and setting dependency property values

Interact with attached properties.

This objective may include but is not limited to: setting attached properties in XAML, getting and setting attached properties programmatically

Implement ICommand.

This objective may include but is not limited to: executing an ICommand, implementing an ICommand, binding to an ICommand, passing a parameter

Working with Data (17%)

Format data.

This objective may include but is not limited to: formatting string values in data binding, formatting culture-specific string values

Implement data binding.

This objective may include but is not limited to: setting the data context, binding data sets to controls, binding elements to other elements, implementing INotifyPropertyChanged, implementing ObservableCollection, setting binding modes, setting a fallback value

Create and consume value converters.

This objective may include but is not limited to: creating a value converter, referencing a value converter, passing parameters

Implement data validation.

This objective may include but is not limited to: implementing the INotifyDataErrorInfo interface, implementing the IDataErrorInfo interface, implementing data binding errors (NotifyOnValidationError, ValidatesOnExceptions, ValidatesOnDataErrors, ValidatesOnNotifyDataErrors)

Interacting with a Host Platform (11%)

Implement the printing API.

This objective may include but is not limited to: handling multiple pages, adding page numbers, printing off-screen visuals

Create out-of-browser applications.

This objective may include but is not limited to: enabling trusted applications, checking for network connectivity, installing and uninstalling applications, displaying toast notifications, checking and updating application versions, setting the application to be chromeless, displaying HTML content by using the web browser control, signing the XAP file, working with COM Interop

Access isolated storage.

This objective may include but is not limited to: reading from and writing to isolated storage, increasing storage size

Interact with the HTML DOM.

This objective may include but is not limited to: accessing cookies, querystring values, and header info; calling into JavaScript from Silverlight; calling into Silverlight from JavaScript; Silverlight-to-Silverlight communication; manipulating the DOM

Access the clipboard.

This objective may include but is not limited to: copying and pasting text, handling situations when the user declines

Read from and write to the host file system.

This objective may include but is not limited to: read from and write to various locations, drag and drop from the file system, using IO dialogs

Handle alternative input methods.

This objective may include but is not limited to: handling right-click, mouse wheel, and multi-touch events

Structuring Applications (13%)

Create and consume resource dictionaries.

This objective may include but is not limited to: utilizing sample data, selecting resources, merging resource dictionaries

Implement localization and globalization.

This objective may include but is not limited to: translating strings, configuring right-to-left language support and FlowDirection

Handle application-level events.

This objective may include but is not limited to: handling Exit, Startup, and UnhandledException events

Deploying Applications (13%)

Configure the Silverlight plug-in.

This objective may include but is not limited to: passing initialization parameters; configuring windowless mode, background color, and sizing of plugins; incorporating nonstandard splash screens, enabling GPU acceleration, setting the frame rate

Dynamically load application resources.

This objective may include but is not limited to: downloading a zip file, extracting content from a zip file, enabling assembly caching

Create a client access policy.

This objective may include but is not limited to: accessing cross-domain content, accessing communication channels, limiting access to resources

Recommended Study Resources

Where to Go from Here

Candidates who pass exam 70-506 earn the MCTS: Silverlight 4, Development certification.