Getting Microsoft Certified: Azure Developer Associate (AZ-204)

This exam proved to be much more difficult than AZ-104. Even though I am a developer and already passed AZ-104 beforehand, some questions were very tricky. I had to read them multiple times to understand what they are asking for. Often enough, I just had to randomly guess the answer, because I didn't know the correct one. I was very surprised to see that I passed the exam with a score of 820/1000.

I think it was a good idea to pass AZ-104 first, because it gave me a good understanding of the Azure ecosystem. I would recommend doing the same. Also, there seems to be a lack of good preparation material for AZ-204. The official Microsoft Learn barely covers the exam topics, considering how tricky the questions were.

I liked the topics covered in the exam, because they were not part of the AZ-104. The queue, event grid and service bus topics were very interesting to learn about. Security is still and identity management is still quite tricky for me, but I am getting there. And I'd argue that Cosmos DB is the most difficult topic of all. Cosmos DB can be very easy to start with, but there are many features and not so much overall experience or material to learn from. So learning relational SQL is much easier and worthwhile.

Preparation

I have used the following resources:

• Udemy - AZ-204: Developing Solutions for Microsoft Azure - A course from Alan Rodrigues. It was okay, but very tedious and code examples were not so good. But it covers a lot of topics if you can stomach sitting through 27 hours of video.
• Udemy - Microsoft Azure for .NET Developers - A course by Trevoir Williams. It was exceptional and engaging. Sadly it only covers a small portion of the exam topics. Yet I highly recommend it, because it covers how to use some of the services in .NET in a very practical way.
• Microsoft Learn: Exam AZ-204: Microsoft Azure Developer Associate - Official training material, with free a sandbox to practice hands-on.
• MeasureUp: Microsoft Practice Test AZ-204: Microsoft Azure Developer - Some additional practice exams. They were better than AZ-104, but I'd recommend to find additional practice tests on other resources.

Final thoughts

Take much more time than you think you would need for AZ-204. Preferably, if you can, take AZ-104 beforehand. I recommend doing cloudlee AZ-104 and John Savill AZ-104 courses. This should give you general picture about Azure and prepare you for AZ-104/204. After that, just reading documentation and following the exam guidelines would be the best way to prepare, apart from the resources I mentioned above (udemy, microsoft learn, measureup).

It took me a few weeks to finally write this blog post because this exam kicked my butt, and I had to take some time off. I am glad I passed it, but I was so certain that I failed during exam that it was quite a rollercoaster of emotions.

The Next one for me will be AZ-400, but I will take a break for a while. Change gears and study some C# and ASP.NET Core.