Hi Paul,
Good to hear you are interested in getting certified ;-)
When thinking about following a course and taking exams it's always a good thing to start in the proper place. When starting with development it's good to make a decision which side of the programming world has your preference. Would you like to program
windows applications or would you like to program the web? There's a number of different courses but they do have their own territory. Reading your question i see that you have some experience with VB6 or similar to that language. That's another issue to think
about. You can go for a Visual Studio certification but you have the option to go for various programming languages. C# is the most common at the moment but VB is also around and well respected.
My advice would be to start slow and get the fundamentals first. So you might start with this course:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/Course.aspx?ID=6367A&locale=en-us which is about Object Orientated Programming
then go for the fundamentals about the .Net framework which could be this path:
http://www.microsoft.com/learning/en/us/exam.aspx?ID=70-505&locale=en-us this one is in relation to windows forms applications development. But the link below
will send you to the general overview of Visual Studio so you can browse yourself.
Review the link above and you will see a tab preparation materials. There you'll find a link to a trainingkit you can use for preparing for the exam.
Be prepared though because the exam is serious business. But then again you were looking for something to challenge you right?
Good luck!
Maurice
