Exam Essentials

Know how to plan application testing.  Understand the differences between the goals of unit testing, integration testing, and regression testing, and at which phases in the application development cycle they are carried out.

Be familiar with multicultural testing issues.  Understand that data such as dates, numbers, and currency might be interpreted differently if the application is running under different locale settings. Understand that text strings embedded in the user interface might make it difficult to localize applications and that errors might occur due to different sized text strings during localization.

Know the differences between Debug and Release builds.  Know how to configure Visual Studio .NET to produce Debug and Release builds selectively. Know where debugging symbol files are located. Know how to configure Debug versus Release builds in ASP.NET applications by using settings in the web.config file.

Know what options in the Project Properties affect debugging.  Know how to select options for application startup during debugging for different types of applications.

Know how to use breakpoints to enter Break mode during debugging.  Know how to set breakpoints and use the new breakpoint conditions to locate problems in your applications.

Be familiar with the Visual Studio .NET debugging tools.  Know how to perform step-by-step debugging through your code. Understand the many windows that are available to give you status information while in Break mode. Know how to use the Command window to run code, query variable values, and give Visual Studio .NET commands.

Be familiar with special considerations for debugging different types of applications.  Know that Windows service applications cannot be run from within Visual Studio .NET. They must be started by the Service Control Manager, and then the Visual Studio .NET debugger can attach to the running process. DLLs can be debugged by specifying an external startup application; XML Web services can be debugged by calling them from a client application. Debugging on a remote computer requires installation of remote components and special permissions on the remote machine. Just-in-Time debugging enables you to attach one of the Visual Studio .NET debuggers to a script-based application when an error occurs during application execution.

Know how to add Debug and Trace statements to your code to instrument the application for monitoring. Know how to set compiler directives to make sure that Debug and Trace statements are included in the build. Understand the difference between the Write, WriteLine, WriteIf, and WriteLineIf methods. Know how to view output from the DefaultTraceListener in the Visual Studio .NET Output window.

Know how to add TraceListeners to your application to direct the output to persistent storage. Understand that the TextWriterTraceListener can write to a text file and that the EventLogTraceListener can send output to the event log. If more than one TraceListener is present in your application, output will be directed to all TraceListeners.

Know how to produce trace output selectively by using TraceSwitches. BooleanSwitches have an on/off behavior (using the Enabled property), so that trace output can be turned on only when a problem appears and you need to troubleshoot. TraceSwitches have a Level property and will produce output only when the Level property is set to the specified level. Switch settings can be set in the source code, but it is often more useful to maintain the settings in the application configuration file. This way, the settings can be changed as often as required without having to change source code. Know how to use conditional statements in your code to test switch settings.

Know how to use SOAP extensions to add custom processing for XML Web services. Create a class that inherits from SoapExtension and override the methods of the base class. In the ProcessMessage method, you select the appropriate stage for your custom code to run. Use BeforeDeserialize or AfterDeserialize for processing incoming SOAP requests. Use BeforeSerialize or AfterSerialize for processing outgoing SOAP responses. Your SOAP extension assembly should also contain a class that inherits from SoapExtensionAttribute. In this class, you will override properties defined by the base class and add new properties for your custom extension. Use your SoapExtensionAttribute to mark all Web methods that should run your extension code.