Microsoft certifications — It is how they know you know, right? If you are really passionate about Windows Phone 7 development, you might want to get the upcoming 71-599 Pro Windows Phone Developer certification under your belt. Not that any certification makes you a rockstar developer; but it would serve as a nice validation of your efforts around WP7 development & proves to everyone that you know the basic guts of it.

So, the 71-599 MCPD Pro exam has been under construction for the past few months with feedback from the hundreds of community SMEs like us via MSFT Connect. It should be available to test takers by the end of July. I just took the invitation-only beta and it looks like it shaped up very nicely. Wondering what exactly it might test you on? This page (here) lists out exactly the skills they are looking for and tells you other details about the test.

So, how do you go about taking a stab at the test? It off course depends from person to person; following are the resources I found most helpful at this present time. This list is not supposed to be exclusive in any way; just point you to a few obvious places. Even if you are a seasoned WP7 developer, it might make sense to brush up on basics; I bet you will discover things you didn’t know. So, here’s my list of resources:

• The Channel9/MSDN WP7 Training Kit (here)

• Charles Petzold’s free 1000 page WP7 book (here)

• Jeff Blankenburg’s “31 days of WP7” (here)

• Windows Phone developer resources (here)

The above list should give you plenty of confidence for the test; you could then build on it with the zillion other resources online, specially follow blogs of community leaders in Windows Phone development. I also realized that the exam (at least my version of it) does test your knowledge on some obvious key topics thoroughly — namely Tombstoning, Push Notification set up & App Certification requirements. So, these are surely things that you might want to be well-versed in.

Best of luck!

Adios