Preparing to MS Exam 70-483 - Looking for weak spots in the knowledge of C# 5.0

If you forgot what is MS Exam 70-483, you can find out it here :)

One of the hardest things in preparation to any exam is finding out areas where our knowledge is not very good, distinguish them and not to get caught in an endless loop of studying and mastering one particular area to keep some time for the other questions which should be examined as well.

Microsoft provides us with some info concerning possible areas covered by MS Exam 70-483 and I'll try to choose the most specific ones to concentrate on them in my preparation work. So, here there are the most specific ones, in my humble opinion:

• Manage Program Flow:

• Exceptions in a multithreaded programs
• Implement exception handling

This subject is not difficult at all but people with no or little working experience, like me, may face unknown kinds of exceptions, because they do not work much in some particular areas, such as, for instance, SQL or Net. I will try to find the most common types of exceptions from every area the C# language can be used.

• Creating and use types:

• Handle dynamic types; ensure interoperability with unmanaged code
• Implementation of common interfaces: 
• IComparable, IComparer
• IClonable
• IDisposable
• IEnumerable, IEnumerator
• IEquatable
• IQueryable
• IUnknown
• Find, execute, and create types at runtime by using reflection: 
• create and apply attributes; read attributes; 
• generate code at runtime by using CodeDom and lambda expressions; 
• use types from the System.Reflection namespace (Assembly, PropertyInfo, MethodInfo, Type)
• Manage the object life cycle: 
• manage unmanaged resources; 
• implement IDisposable, including interaction with finalization; 
• manage IDisposable by using the Using statement; manage finalization and garbage collection
• TypeConversion
• Parse methods
• BitConverter
• Convert
• Parsing DateTime
• Built-in C# types and their scopes

• Debug applications and implement sequrity

• Validate application input:
• validate JSON data; 
• data collection types; 
• manage data integrity; 
• evaluate a regular expression to validate the input format; 
• use built-in functions to validate data type and content out of scope; 
• writing regular expressions
• Perform symmetric and asymmetric encryption
• choose an appropriate encryption algorithm; 
• manage and create certificates; 
• implement key management; 
• implement the System.Security namespace; 
• hashing data; 
• encrypt streams.
• Implement diagnostics
• Performance counters
• Windows Event Log
• Manage assemblies
• version assemblies; 
• sign assemblies using strong names; 
• implement side-by-side hosting; 
• put an assembly in the global assembly cache; 
• create a WinMD assembly

• Implement data access

• Consume Data
• retrieve data from a database
• update data in a database
• consume JSON and XML data
• retrieve data by using web services 
• Query and manipulate data and objects by using LINQ 
• Query data by using operators (projection, join, group, take, skip, aggregate); 
• create method-based LINQ queries; 
• query data by using query comprehension syntax; 
• select data by using anonymous types; 
• force execution of a query; 
• read, filter, create, modify data structures by using LINQ to XML 
• LINQ to SQL
• Serialize and deserialize data by using 
• binary serialization, 
• custom serialization, 
• XML Serializer, 
• JSON Serializer, 
• Data Contract Serializer