Questions about preparing for advanced developer cert (501)

Question

I have been actively studying for 501 cert and have gone through all the posts/blogs/videos about how to prepare, including another post here: How to study/prepare for the Salesforce ADVANCED Developer Certification?. But I am still very unsure about myself, as there is no dump about 501 in the website which I can check my readiness like 401.

About me, I don't have very long experience in SFDC development - Only two months. Before that was four months' study on Apex/VF. I have gone through the study guide of apex and Visualforce. I can't remember everything but there shouldn't be any concept about apex/VF which completely have no clue. Within my work, I did every task every carefully and aim at 100% or nearly 100% test coverage for every piece of code as I see them as a way to learn.

I know the recommended experience is at least 8 months but I still want to give it a try. My goal is to register after two months. Please let me know if it is too aggressive.

Here are my questions:

1. In Jeff Douglas' post, he mentioned: Visualforce - know all of the components, how they are used and their attributes. Definitely I can't remember all of them. I just google them when use. Is it really important to recite all these?

2. Visualforce Page Templates are mentioned many times. But I can't find relative information except Visualforce email templates. Is that Visualforce page template still available?

3. Should I recite the details, like how many @future methods allowed?

Any other suggestions are also highly welcome.

Answer 1

In Jeff Douglas' post, he mentioned: Visualforce - know all of the components, how they are used and their attributes. Definitely I can't remember all of them. I just google them when use. Is it really important to recite all these?

you should def know the components but not till the last attribute. make sure you fully understand components incl. declarations, supported attribute types, ...

Visualforce Page Templates are mentioned many times. But I can't find relative information except Visualforce email templates. Is that Visualforce page template still available?

yes it is, have a look here http://www.salesforce.com/us/developer/docs/pages/index_Left.htm#StartTopic=Content/pages_templates_intro.htm

Should I recite the details, like how many @future methods allowed? no matter if exam or real life, you should know platform limits

I also remembers a lot of focus on integrations (webservices, call-outs, ...) and deployment approaches.

Answer 2

That's quite a broad/combination of questions, maybe not that suited for the usual stackexchage format. 501 is not like 401 and in my opinion you shouldn't want to rely on knowledge dumps. Do it when you feel ready. I wouldn't be concerned about the 8 month advise, if you have a few months of active development based on native apex and visualforce components, you should be fine.

You don't need to know all VF components by head, but you need to know to use which ones where, and which are available. Don't rebuild something custom if it exists.

Visualforce Templates are listed in the VF dev guide under Templating with Visualforce. The functionality isn't very extensive, know how to use components well though.

You should be aware of some limits, but rather their existence and how to develop taking them into account than knowing the exact amount of X you're allowed to do. You should however have a very high understanding on how code and other logic is executed on the force.com platform, and how you're expected to maintain authorization and security in your custom code and pages.

Knowing how to test your code in it's different aspects is also quite important (in every language, on every platform).

Personally I found the multiple choice part of the certification harder than the developer assignment. This answer is based on my personal experience getting the 501 certificate.