This week, I am on holiday, meant to be in Egypt watching the kids swim in the Red Sea, drinking as much beer as I can & getting pink. As this didn’t happen, I decided to fit in an exam instead. Why not get another qualification instead?
MB-400, the new developer exam, was the one I was dreading, more so than MB-600 I did a couple of weeks back, as my hands-on development has really ground to a halt in the last couple of years, as I move towards the design / architecting side of Power Apps. I know the capabilities, but the syntax was something I had to revise, a lot.
My mind maps for this one are listed with the others here.
This exam, I owe a lot to Joe Griffin, the CRM Chap, his blog is here https://crmchap.co.uk/. He is writing a whole series of articles on this and it has just been announced, along with the legend Julian Sharp that he is creating a series of webinars to help people with the exam. Joe’s articles were a thorough revision set for me and opened some long-forgotten parts of the abundance which is the D365 dev landscape.
Also, Ivan Ficko, his blog https://dynamicsninja.blog/ was a great help when I was down a the dirty end, working out how to set up Webhooks.
Finally, the learning paths on Microsoft are pretty good, especially for Power Apps. The Exam has several listed here but I would advise working through all the Power Apps ones you can find, and practice.
This is one of the exams that you need experience, get out your trial environment, visual studio code & create a Javascript, PCF control and all the other parts.
Exam Content
There was a few surprises in the exam, most notably, the inclusion of F & O questions. You need to have a basic understanding of their capabilities.
PowerApps formulas were also in there and stumped me. Casting values was something I had not come across, as more of an old school Customer Engagement guy.
Ribbon Workbench also had a couple of questions and stretched my knowledge somewhat. There were the now usual groups of questions related to the scenario as well, all digging into aspects across the whole dev ecosystem.
Security, solutions, model driven, canvas, client scripting, PCF, Flow, BPFs all had at least one question as well.
Overall, it was tough. Tested my knowledge anyway, as a lay developer.