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Finally, I got around to my first Associate-level Microsoft certification. I’d originally planned to sit the AZ-204 exam for the Azure Developer Associate certification in November, as a follow-on to sitting AZ-104 in September. I’d fit AZ-102 somewhere after those, as I just wanted to do that one for fun. In the end, that all turned out to be too ambitious; with work being as busy as it turned out to be, and me quickly realising I’d bitten off more than I could chew, I kicked both exams further down the road. Both were pushed into February, while I figured out how I wanted to approach things. I decided I would give myself space to pass one Associate exam before committing to any more. For whatever reason, on the day I made the decision I was more confident about the Azure Developer material (funny that, given I’m a Lead Developer!), rather than the Administrator course, so I went with that. But I still needed a deadline, preferably not too far in the future, so March 31st was picked!

The last week of February, and all of March was given over to study in the evenings and some weekends. I used the official Microsoft Learn materials – both the new set linked from the certification page, and the older, more in-depth material which was previously tagged. When I started out I would do a practice test once a week to see how I was doing, and for a while it felt like I was doing pretty badly! Test scores were regularly around 65% until it started to sink in around weeks 3-4 and scores started to creep up slowly. At that point I started doing tests every day on MeasureUp – which has a nice feature where you can set the practice test to have just questions you haven’t seen in your previous N practices – and every other day on Whizlabs.

As the exam approached I was feeling really confident: I was starting to regularly score 95%, with an average score of ~85%, and practice tests under exam conditions were taking less than 30 minutes. While I didn’t think the exam would be easy, I was thinking I was in a good place.

The exam itself was… ouch. Much of it seemed at the time like it was something the learning material had only skimmed over, and I didn’t have nearly as many “I recognise that question!” moments as I did in the Fundamentals exams. It was easily the hardest Microsoft exam I’d taken, possibly one of the hardest exams I’ve ever taken. Question after question felt unfamiliar and not something I’d covered in study or practice. In my defence, a lot of the question wording left something to be desired. This is a constant complaint of mine with MS exams – the questions often feel like they are incomplete sentences, badly translated, or both. I remember one question asked me to pick a solution with barely any context to go on – I spent a good 5 minutes rereading the entire page and checking I hadn’t missed a link to an exhibit or case study that would allow me to intuit an answer! Looking back, I can see things a bit clearer-eyed and relate the questions I remember to the material, but at the time I had such a sinking feeling I would fail the exam.

But in the end, my preparation didn’t let me down. As unconfident as I felt part-way through the exam, I still passed comfortably, with a good score that was slightly above my average practice score.

So now that AZ-204 is out of the way, what’s next? I still want to do AZ-104 (Azure Administrator Associate), but I’m not in a hurry to repeat the gruelling exam experience just yet. Hopefully I can squeeze it in this year though. I’m also one step closer to reaching my ultimate goal – Microsoft Certified: DevOps Engineer Expert (AZ-400) – of which, Azure Developer Associate is one of the pre-requisites.

More importantly – I want to actually use more of what I learned! I feel like I’ve still only barely scratched the surface of Azure. While much of it is overkill for the simple side projects like I do in my spare time, I still have a few ideas in my head for what I could be using it for.

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Note to self: don’t book exams for very first thing on a Monday, as you might not get to finish your coffee beforehand! Bad scheduling aside, this morning I passed the Microsoft MS-900 exam. This takes me to five certifications this year, adding Microsoft Certified: Microsoft 365 Fundamentals to the list.

I hadn’t really planned to do this exam, and it was very much a spur-of-the-moment thing, largely driven by “well, I’ve done the others, so I might as well…” As I mentioned the other day, I found this one a bit odd to study for. Although I passed, I don’t feel I was as prepared for this exam as I was my others, even though I tried to approach it in the same manner I’ve approached my other certifications this summer. I really struggled to find resources which were both comprehensive and up-to-date. A lot of the non-MS resources were from 2019 and 2020, but the exam was updated in 2021. That said, enough of the core information was available, and my view is probably being tinted by my initial… disappointment(?)… at my own performance. Yes, I know that sounds odd to say after passing, but I guess I just feel I could do and should have done better.

I guess if I had any advice to give about the exam it would be: study the chart of MS365 editions and what features are available in each one. There were a lot of very specific questions on this – more than I was expecting – and I wish I’d learned it in greater detail.

As far as resources go, I used my regular mix of Microsoft Learn’s free study material, and the Percipio video courses I have access to through my work. As there is no Whizlabs module for MS-900, I used MeasureUp for the first time, so I could have access to a reliable online practice test. It was good, following the format of the real exam pretty closely. I’ll be using their tests again when I’m going for the AZ-104, AZ-204, and AZ-400 exams.

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Microsoft Certified: Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals award badge

This evening I completed (and passed) the Microsoft SC-900 exam, earning my fourth certification this year – Microsoft Certified: Security, Compliance, and Identity Fundamentals.

This certification was interesting in a few different ways – first, it was kind of done “spur of the moment”; I’d passed my other exams and wanted to keep the momentum going, so I booked it without much forethought. Secondly, I’ve done loads of Secure Software Development Lifecycle training and documentation over the last few years, so I feel I might have had a leg-up on at least some of the fundamentals of this topic (pardon the pun). Finally, I genuinely found some of the tools referenced in the training to be quite interesting in and of themselves – something I hadn’t appreciated before diving in.

As per usual, I used my regular mix of Microsoft Learn’s free online resources, supplemented by access to Percipio resources through my work, and this great “cram” video by John Saville.

I’m planning to have a bit of a break before I’m back on the exam trail; I next have some virtual classroom training in September and October, followed by Associate-level exams in October and November, which will be my last for the year.

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Now that I’d completed the data side of Azure, I wanted to try out something I was a little less familiar with; I’ve not gone near anything Machine Learning or AI-related in my work so far, so I felt getting at least some exposure to these topics wouldn’t go amiss. I’m glad I opted to add Microsoft Certified: Azure AI Fundamentals [AI-900] into the mix of what I’m studying this summer. It was a fun course, and one I fully recommend.

I wasn’t expecting to enjoy this topic as much as I did. Maybe it was partly a reaction to how little I’d enjoyed the Power Platform Fundamentals course. AI/ML is not an area I see myself working on often, possibly never outside of certification courses, but I don’t think I’d mind at all if someone did ask me to jump into a small project using Azure’s AI platform and tools.

A lot of the exam focused on the Responsible AI priciples, along with identifying the different types of workloads, tools, and models to use. This was one of the easier exams I’d sat lately. It took me around twenty minutes to complete, and I passed with a higher score than I expected.

As far as resources go, I used my regular mix of Microsoft Learn’s free study material, and Whizlabs. The prep for this exam was a little more practical than some of my other exams lately, which is probably why I found it a bit more fun.

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This afternoon I passed the Microsoft PL-900 exam, earning my second certification this year – Microsoft Certified: Power Platform Fundamentals.

Let me be upfront by saying: I really did not enjoy this certification. For whatever reason, I just could not connect with the subject matter, and the last few weeks have felt like an uphill struggle the whole way through. Even when I tried getting hands-on with the various pieces of the Power Platform, a lot of it was just plain unenjoyable. Power Automate and Power Virtual Agents seem interesting enough, but Power BI and Power Apps are areas I’d be happy to not have to be around again.

Maybe it was because I didn’t know much about Power Platform before starting (other than a nugget of Power BI exposure in my Azure Data Fundamentals certification), but I really did not expect so much of the course and exam to be taken up by Microsoft Dynamics. At times it felt like a big disadvantage to not have prior knowledge and experience of Dymanics and Dataverse.

Still, sometimes you just have to power through (pardon the pun). To pass the exam I used Microsoft Learn’s free online resources, and both the Whizlabs video course and practice tests. I’m pretty sure I wouldn’t have passed if I hadn’t made such heavy use of those practice tests. In the end, they were the only thing it felt was making the topic “stick”.

With PL-900 out of the way, I just have one more exam to do from my Summer of Certifications list. AI-900 is up next, and it’s probably the certifiation I’m most looking forward to.

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This evening I completed (and passed) the Microsoft DP-900 exam, which makes – Microsoft Certified: Microsoft Azure Data Fundamentals the first certification I can cross off my Summer of Certifications list.

The exam itself was fairly straightforward. It felt like the natural follow-on to the general Microsoft Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900) certification I passed last year, and follows the same multiple-choice/select-the-right-phrase format as AZ-900. For the most part it meant knowing which Azure data service should be used in a given scenario, or what feature in a solution fulfils the need; for the most part it’s usually straightforward to spot, but occaisionally there’s a subtlty in the question which means the seemingly-obvious answer is not the correct one. But may that was just me.

To prepare for the exam I used mix of Microsoft Learn’s free online resources, supplemented by access to Percipio resources through my work, and WhizLabs practice tests. As someone who has been neck-deep in databases for years, I feel I had a bit of a leg-up on some of the more general topics – which meant it was really just the finer points of the specific Azure data solutions I had to learn.

Part of the exam syllabus covered Business Intelligence reporting using Power BI, which might be a good starting point for the next exam in my calendar: Power Platform Fundamentals (PL-900)!