I recently took MS exam 70-480 (and passed and was surprisingly delighted). So before the good feelings dissolve away I thought I would publish a few notes and useful links. I’m not going to be comprehensive but I’m just going to highlight areas that came up for me that I needed deeper reading on.

Generally

The exam does feel old hat especially the JavaScript section. It is frustrating to have to remember Microsoft specific syntax (AddEventHandler!!!). But I’ve seen worse and there is stuff that is still interesting and relevant in there. The good thing is that there are techniques and syntax that crops up over and over and can really help you winnow the answers down on the exam.

Basic stuff to know

• • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • JQuery . It’s not realistic to learn all JQuery just for the exam but it does assume you know it. The things that seem to come up the most are ….
    • Ajax, 
    • JQuery selectors
    • DOM manipulation

• Regex – My go to reg ex site is https://www.regexbuddy.com/. Probably a bit much for this exam but I’ve always liked it.
• HTML5

The book

I’m old school and still prefer to start with the written word on bits of paper. The standard book is this …

People are really negative about exam ref books generally and this one gets the obligatory poor reviews (and some goods ones in fairness). But do you know what – it’s fine. It’s not that readable, it’s got a lot of gaps and some of it is out of date now (and maybe was never correct in the first place). But it highlights all the syllabus areas for you then it is up to you to go on and read more. I think people get upset because the book alone isn’t enough to pass the exam. So long as you appreciate that then it’s fine.

Syllabus

https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/learning/exam-70-480.aspx

The key thing is to go through it all with a fine tooth comb (or hair care implement of choice). So biting our lips and going through each section ….

Section 1: Implement and Manipulate Document Structures and Objects

JavaScript

Important bits here is understanding the JavaScript this keyword (notoriously confusion) and a tight tight grasp of JavaScript scope. Other things are

• JavaScript operators. Know the difference between == and === and also the modulus operator.
• Prototypical inheritance
• Javascript events. Know difference in syntax between addEventListener and addEvent

HTML5

• Semantic elements. If I’m honest, some of the questions have a ‘guess what I’m thinking’ quality to them. Get to grips with the Microsoft party line on when these should be used. Just suck it up.
• Geolocation API
• App Cache
• Canvas appears a lot but there is a lot of stuff out there for instance here and here among lots of other places.
• SVG. It’s good to know when to use SVG and when to use the canvas elements. For instance SVG scales inherently.

Section 2: Implement Program Flow

JavaScript Arrays

Good grasp of javascript control structures is vital so
array iteration (more detail here) also associative arrays and understand why they iterate differently.

Web sockets

Very high level only. How to call and pass events backwards I forwards. I read this and as interesting as it was it is way too much. Spend less time than I did on this.

Ajax

Conversely Ajax comes up a lot in detail

• XMLHttpRequest
• Readstate enumeration
• Parse Xml comes up in this context

Web Workers

Web workers also comes up. Specific points I found were

• difference between close and terminate
• what is and isn’t available to the worker process

Section 3: Access and Secure data

Reg Ex

Regular Expressions crops up here and and how to call from JavaScript Which methods belong to the regex pattern and which methods belong to the string class are useful to know here.

JQuery Forms

JQuery forms API. Pay attention to differences between serialise and serialiseArray methods and be secure in your knowledge of how to submit forms through JQuery.

JavaScript Encoding

JavaScript encoding and decoding of Uris and query string . Comes up bizzarely often so one to really know. Know which method gives which output and which one to use to ensure that the query string is encoded.

Html5 input types

Html 5 input types. Really useful to memorise them all and know all the possible attributes i.e.

• step
• min
• max
• title
• pattern etc…

particular know the attributes that can be used to limit the data input format e.g. type=”number”.

Section 4: Use CSS3 in Applications

I wanted to do this exam primarily to improve my CSS which is my weakest web dev side so I spent a bit of time of this. I’m sure you will need less.

Basics

• CSS measurement units . I finally committed to memory what em does
• CSS selectors
• CSS pseudo classes / elements
• The ordering is important for links – LOVE HATE. Could be my feelings towards 70-480 exam
• Borders
• CSS short cuts are useful to know

The cascade

• What are user and author stylesheets
• Official guidance on the cascade. Probably too much
• Better and more readable from mozilla. Really know this and include the cascade order of user, author and user-agent sheets.

Layout

Layout comes up a lot so

• Position property
• Flexbox
• Grid
• Columns 
• I didn’t know the difference between inline and inline-block. I do now

Text

• Text transform
• Text shadow
• font face

Fancy stuff

• Animations including keyframes
• Transitions
• 2D vs 3D transformations
• Backface visibility
• Linear gradients and radial gradients. Remember which direction the gradient runs
• Rounded corners

Generally with the animation /transitions side of things I found it most useful to look at worked examples of some standard (though clever to me) forms of animations. Card flips and loading spinners are typical stuff.

Never saw

I never saw anything on the drag and drop api.  It had a decent sized section in the Microsoft exam ref book but I didn’t see this on the exam or the revision questions. Don’t blame me if you get 7 questions about it though.

Good luck

And of course best of luck for the exam. As painful as it can be, it does feel good to pass a Microsoft exam. Take it from someone who has passed onto the other side.