The second time was a charm. On Friday 4/27/07, I passed the 70-554, part two of two in the MCSD.NET upgrade to MCPD EA series. This was my second time taking it as I narrowly missed passing it two weeks ago by about 3 questions.
The first part of the exam was fairly straight forward for me: 28 questions on "Distributed Applications Development" (70-529) - a lot of questions about WSE 3.0, SOAP headers, and the difference between SoapRPC and SoapDocument encoding. Transcender exam prep worked very well for those questions.
My trouble came with the second half of the test, "Designing and Developing Enterprise Applications by Using the Microsoft.NET Framework." (70-549) One question described a process and required a flowchart to be filled in for that process. Questions around performance testing require one to determine which performance indicators are relevant, and to infer importance from any subtleties in the problem statement. For example, a question about which methods should be unit-tested on a third party component might mention that "new methods were added, and overall performance has been improved." The developer should infer that this means the components internals must have changed and thus one should unit test all the methods, not just the new ones.
It is important to read the questions in this second half thoroughly and to consider your answers carefully. There is plenty of time (about 90 minutes for 28 questions), so make use of it and good luck.