I sat down and completed the Beta exam for Virtual Earth this week. Clearly I’m not allowed to elaborate on the questions but I’d like to share my thoughts and experience.
The exam was scheduled for 4 hours, 3hours for the exam, 30 min for comments. I completed it in about 2 hours, leaving a dozen or so comments.
The format was quite good, the exam is completely automated running in the standard test suit. It featured multiple choice questions, some with one selection, some with multiple. I quite liked the concept of choosing and arranging pseudo code, top marks for those questions.
I’m not a big fan of memorising code, I work with a copy of the API documentation open, with no intellisence for Virtual Earth JavaScript in Visual Studio I find copy and paste very effective. I have to say that I do know most of the functions by heart and although the questions are multiple choice they are providing options that could very well be valid, again I can’t be specific but on occasion it comes down to a 50:50 guess unless you really knew the method to every parameter.
The breadth of coverage of Virtual Earth is pretty comprehensive, I’m lucky in that I have played with almost all aspects either commercially or while helping someone so know it all pretty well. I think someone who has just built a few applications would struggle, for example you may never have used the routing functionality.
The exam also covers Map Point Web Service (MWS) pretty heavily. I understand there are features that compliment VE in the service. My tip is to learn that API focusing on the areas that compliment Virtual Earth, again no details from me.
To give you an idea I answer many questions on the MSDN VE forums and have worked commercially with VE now for 18 months non-stop. I have used MWS for geocoding and reverse geocoding. I didn’t study. Of the 70 questions I noted 24 I wasn’t 100% certain on. That is either it came down to two and was a 50:50 guess or I wasn’t confident I knew the syntax exactly.
So with any luck I’ll get around the 80% mark but I have to wait 8 weeks to find out. Now I have said that I’ll probably fail and wonder why I blogged at all 
Anyway if your keen about Virtual Earth you should book an exam, do some study and sit the test. John.