The Central Maryland Association of .NET Professionals Certification Study Group is a special interest group. The group focuses on study for the preperation to take the Microsoft certifications. It is free and open to the public.

The meetings are open to anyone who is interested in becoming certified as well as those who just desire to follow the course materials and learn.

The group chooses a particular exam preperation book(s) to study throughout the group season. Participants are encouraged to choose chapters from the book to present to the group at the meetings.

At the meeting we have general reviews, presentations, and question and answer sessions.

The meetings run from 7:00 PM until 9:00 PM. The group meets from fall through early summer and takes a break during the summer months.

The Certification Study Group meeting is held at the Northrop Grumman Gateway Facility in Linthicum (please review the schedule of meetings to get directions for each one).

To see a list of upcoming meetings for the groups, click here.

This Season, the CMAP Certification Study Group (Group #1) is studying Accessing Data with Microsoft .NET Framework 4 (Exam 70-516). This topic was formerly known simply as ADO.NET. The book can be purchased through any source and is available from Amazon.com through the link shown to the right.

The material covered in these sessions will relate to the data technologies in ADO.NET 4.0 with Visual Studio as they apply for preparing to take the Microsoft Certified Technology Specialist (MCTS) exam 70-516. However, there is no expectation that you intend to actually take the exam to attend or participate in the sessions.

This training kit was designed for developers who write or support applications that access data, written in C# or Visual Basic, using Visual Studio 2010 and the Microsoft .NET Framework 4.0.

By using this training kit we will discuss the following topics among others:

• Work with the ADO.NET disconnected classes
• Work with the ADO.NET connection classes
• Write and execute LINQ queries
• Implement LINQ to SQL classes
• Implement LINQ to XML in your applications
• Implement the ADO.NET Entity Framework in your applications
• Create and Implement WCF Data Service applications
• Monitor and Collect ADO.NET performance data
• Synchronize offline data
• Deploy Data Access applications

The Certification Study Group = "Accessing Data with Microsoft .NET Framework 4" - members communicate through a special message board. The message board is Yahoo Groups based and you must subscribe to the board to participate. To subscribe, simply click on the link below and choose to join the group when your browser opens to the Yahoo page. Please take the time to join the yahoo based message board specifically for the Certification Study Group - Accessing Data with Microsoft .NET Framework 4.

Click to join the CMAP Certification Study Group #1 - .Accessing Data with Microsoft .NET Framework 4