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I haven’t usually been putting up posts around the exams that I take. A few months back I did decide to write one on the MB-600 exam (MB-600 Solution Architect Exam), which just took off! It was quite amazing (& pleasing) how many people were looking at it, & asking me questions around the exam.

As a result, I’ve decided to continue this, and am therefore now writing this post on the MB-400 exam.

There are several different ‘ranges’ of exams within the Dynamics 365/Power Platform space. These are aimed at different types of roles, or specific specialisation/s within a role. A good example of this is the MB-2xx range. It covers functional technology, and is split across the different ‘main’ areas of Dynamics 365.

The MB-400 (the only one in the range at the moment) is aimed at developers. According to the official description for the exam:

Candidates for this exam are Developers who work with Microsoft Power Apps model-driven apps in Dynamics 365 to design, develop, secure, and extend a Dynamics 365 implementation. Candidates implement components of a solution that include application enhancements, custom user experience, system integrations, data conversions, custom process automation, and custom visualizations.
Candidates must have strong applied knowledge of Power Apps model-driven apps in Dynamics 365, including in-depth understanding of customization, configuration, integration, and extensibility, as well as boundaries and constraints. Candidates should have a basic understanding of DevOps practices for Power Apps model-driven apps in Dynamics 365. Candidates must expose, store, and report on data.
Candidates should have development experience that includes JavaScript, TypeScript, C#, HTML, .NET, Microsoft Azure, Office 365, RESTful Web Services, ASP.NET, and Power BI.

As anyone who knows me will attest, I am NOT a developer. However I decided (for several reasons) to give this one a go, and see what would happen! I knew I’d be pushing myself out of my comfort zone, there would be things I wouldn’t understand/know at ALL, but hey – I was curious to see what would happen! Even more challenging, I decided to book & take it within a 24 hour period!

Now as this has been out for a little while (& isn’t in Beta), there’s thankfully some good resources on Microsoft Learn about it. Take a look at https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/learn/certifications/exams/mb-400, where there are several learning paths that can be followed.

A big shout out as well to Julian Sharp & Joe Griffin who recently ran a multi-week course around it. The official Microsoft learning paths are great of course, but seem to miss out quite a bit of what’s actually needed to be known for this. The course that they ran covered a lot more. Hopefully there will be more courses like this run in the future!

When passing it (& assuming that you’ve passed the MB-200 as well), you get a lovely shiny badge!

Microsoft Certified: Power Apps + Dynamics 365 Developer Associate — I’m SO proud of this!

Once again, I sat the exam through the proctored option (ie from home). The experience went somewhat better than previous times. Amusingly I got told off by the proctor during the exam for ‘looking down at the keyboard’, rather than looking at the screen! I explained that I was using a different computer, & kept clicking the wrong mouse button on it (leaving aside that I was exhausted when doing it!).

So, as before, it’s not permitted to share any of the exam questions. This is in the rules/acceptance for taking the exam. I’ve therefore put an overview of the sorts of questions that came up during my exam. (Note: exams are composed from question banks, so there could be many things that weren’t included in my exam, but could be included for someone else!).

Model driven apps:
- User experience
- Show/hide fields
- Change field labels
Canvas apps – functionality, online/offline capabilities, field types (including searching/filtering data)
Plugin debugging
Configuring security for system connections (security types)
D365 Web API – how it’s used, types of calls made from/to it
Azure API – making calls to/from it
Code for importing data (debugging, variables)
Advanced Find
Types of calls (synchronous, asynchronous, )
Data modelling
Creating & deploying solutions through different methods
Publisher versioning
Identifying code variables, and saying what would happen in given scenarios
Power Apps Component Framework (PCF) – how to use, how to package components, how to deploy
PCF components & classes
JavaScript – code examples, what happens when a given scenario happens
JavaScript functions
Dynamics 365 Ribbon – what it is, what you can do with it, different types of functionality & ways to do things with it
Security & Permissions, including roles, teams, field level security, business units
Workflows, Power Automate Flows (how they’re set up, different functionality within them, how to do things with them given a specific scenario)
Business Rules (what they can/can’t do, different scopes, etc)
Field types (eg option-sets, calculated fields, roll-up fields, multi-select, etc)
Importing solutions – requirements for this, versioning, deployment between environments
Compatibility with Microsoft Teams

Now many of these (as I said above) are outside of my comfort zone. In fact, I’d say that even with absolutely cramming for a whole day for the exam, I still felt that I was guessing the answer for at least 30% of the questions. Admittedly though, as Julian Sharp says, a ‘gut feeling’ answer is usually right most of the time, coming from what the subconscious has absorbed during revision.

I was REALLY happy that I got a passing mark for this, & admittedly was VERY relieved as well. So now another lovely shiny badge in my collection, and I’m now going to go and update it on LinkedIn as well!

If you have any questions on this, feel free to drop them below, and I’ll try to help out as best as I can!

Well, somewhat of a mouthful of a title for this article, but I couldn’t think of a better way to put it!

You know the scenario – we’ve all been there. There’s a custom form (for a system entity, or even a custom entity). Multiple sections, tabs, and multiple fields that are required. Users are going through data entry, but SOMEHOW have forgotten to fill one (or more???) in, and they’re just not able to save the form!

Well, Microsoft has now upped the quality of the user experience, and OH BOY was I SO excited to see this!

Previously when you clicked the Save button, it just wouldn’t allow you to save. It told you that it was missing required information, and you had to go search to see WHICH field(s) you had missed out on.

But search no longer. For now the notification bar has a whole new behaviour:

Firstly, it tells you that there are notifications, and to select to view (Note: If you’ve only missed out one field, just skip to step 2!)

Then when you click on it, it tells you which (required) fields have data missing from them!

Even better, if you click on the notification for a specific missing field, it even takes you to that field – no longer do you have to try to find where it is!

This is truly amazing, and will help enable users (and relieve their frustration) so much!