The skills measured come from an SME group selected by Microsoft. Early on in the process of exam design a request is sent out for SME profiles and based on the candidates a certain amount are picked and brought to Redmond to work out what should be in the
exam based on their knowledge and experience.Based on the SME's feedback a certain amount of topics will be suggested and the question writers will use this to create the questions. During the beta ALL questions in the exam pool are tested to see how people
perform against them. Once the beta period is over and all the data is collected, another group of SMEs will go through each question and be asked "would a person of x experience know this based on your knowledge" so for example, would you expect
a person of say 1 to 2 years web development in ASP.NET be able to connect to data, localise a site or design different layers in an ASP.NET Web app.Some questions will not make it through this process .
The MCTS is the how you do something exam and is not really basic per se. You should expect a person with an MCTS Web Applications to be able to build an ASP.NET application from scratch and know most of the ins and outs and gotchas involved in that. They
may not know to use a specific control over another one (that is built into the Pro exams) but they will be able to program against it.
Blog:
http://www.certsandprogs.com
70-515 Objectives List with MSDN Links
70-536 Objectives List with MSDN Links
70-505 Objectives List with MSDN Links
70-562 Objectives List with MSDN Links
70-433 Objectives List with MSDN Links
