How to prepare for the Microsoft Azure 70-532 certification
Microsoft has a few certifications for Azure and one of them is the “70-532 Developing Microsoft Azure Solutions” which is mainly targeted for developers. I will try to make a breakdown of the steps I followed that helped me pass the exam.
Get the latest updates
All the Azure certifications get updated very often (every 3 months approximately) so go to Microsoft Azure page and search for “Exam 532 change document”. You will then find the link that links to the pdf with the latest exam changes.
Play with Azure Portal and pick your course!
At first, it would be very beneficial to learn your way around Azure portal. It can be quite overwhelming in the beginning (with all these available services and options), but there are two courses that might help you.
The first one is this course from Udemy: Azure Course. I paid £10 for it so I recommend you to wait when its on sale again (or maybe delete your cookies?
). Follow what the instructor does, as himself suggests many times throughout, play with the available options, create different services, break things! Also, there are some videos of the course by the instructor on Youtube so you can try before you buy.
Another very helpful course was this one from Pluralsight: https://app.pluralsight.com/paths/certificate/developing-microsoft-azure-solutions-70-532. I’ve only watched the 4th section (Implement Web and Mobile Services on Microsoft Azure) and the instructor goes into much detail and that really helped me. If you choose the Pluralsight exam, you’ll get free online exam tests as well (check the image below).
Don’t forget to revisit the change document because some of the sections of the courses might have been removed from the actual exam.
Book your exam date
I know, even after completing the Udemy course you don’t feel like you’re ready to give the exam and that’s understandable! But if you have an exam date set, it will keep your motivation high and it will stop you from procrastinating your study. And don’t worry, you can always reschedule for free 5 days before the exam and push back your exam date.
At this point after you finished one of the courses I believe you’d be ready to pass in 1-1,5 month if you study around 15 hours per week.
So, go again to the Microsoft Azure 70-532 page and schedule your exam! I picked the slightly more expensive option (~180 pounds) which gives you the benefit of a free retake and an online test preparation from MeasureUp. To be fair, I only did the first section (Virtual Machines) of the MeasureUp exam and it was really helpful.
Watch the exam preparation video from Microsoft
The exam preparation video will help you identify the key points where you should focus more. This can be extremely helpful as the exam date is getting closer 
.
Practice!
Now its time to practice with online tests either with the Kanplan test or the one from MeasureUp.
It can be hard if you practice the full exam with random questions so what worked great for me was to practice each section separately. Choose to get questions only from the first section and only go to the second one when you reach 70% score. When you finish the 4th section repeat the process as many times as you feel comfortable.
Also don’t forget to choose the option to “Show Answer Explanation” so whenever you give the wrong answer you can read the explanation right away and follow the links for further study. The answer explanations is maybe the most important thing in your preparation because not only they will help you answer similar questions but they will also give you a broader context which can be really helpful.
You’re ready!
At this point you should be ready to pass the exam. The only thing you have to do is to be well rested on the day of the exam because its quite a long one (it was around 3 hours). Some feel it’s a lot of time but it depends how quickly you’re going to answer the questions as the case study ones might take a while (one case study took me 30 minutes to answer!).
I hope you found this guide helpful and good luck on your exam!