In what must be one of the most unusual uses I have put Team Foundation Server to, I decided to use it to help me prepare for the “71–528: Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 – Web-based Client Development” Beta exam which I am sitting this week. (The exam will be released as 70–528 in February next year)

I started by heading to the Microsoft exam preparation guide for 70–528 . I copied the HTML table that listed each of the skills being measured and pasted it into Excel. I did a bit of clean up to the spreadsheet to give me a nice clean list and then fired up Visual Studio 2005 Team Suite.

I create a New Team Project called 71–528Prep and chose the defaults for the rest of the Team Creation wizard. The next task was to Query all Work Items and then choose to update the work items using Excel. I copied and pasted my clean list of exam study tasks into the spreadsheet and Published the list back into TFS.

I then created a new ASP.NET Project and I am working through the work items one by one making sure I cover as much of the examinable content as I can. When I feel I am happy with my knowledge of a particular topic, I update the work item to Resolved and move onto the next one.

You can see in the following screenshot that I created each of the work items as Tasks. I did think about creating a custom work item type called “Study Task” but then I figured my time was probably better spent actually studying ASP.NET 2.0 instead of playing with TFS