All About Sitecore 10 .Net Developer Certification Exam

I recently appeared for the Sitecore 10 .Net developer certification exam and passed the exam with a 94% overall score. Before the Sitecore 10 certification, I have already passed the Sitecore 9.x and Sitecore 8.x developer certification exams in previous years. Many Sitecore developers who want to appear for this exam and start their development career with Sitecore have many questions regarding the exam. eg, Sitecore exam study material, level of exam, how to purchase the exam and appear for the exam, etc. Through this blog, I will try to touch on all these areas about Sitecore certification.

If you are preparing for the Sitecore XM Cloud Developer Certification Exam, read my blog here: https://sitecorewithraman.wordpress.com/2023/12/25/all-about-sitecore-xm-cloud-developer-certification-exam/

About Sitecore 10 .Net Developer certification:

The Sitecore 10 .NET Developer Certification Exam tests candidates on the critical competencies required to develop and administer Sitecore 10.

Prerequisites

This exam is intended for the Sitecore developers. To take the Sitecore 10 .NET Developer certification exam, you should meet the following prerequisites:

• Have at least one year of development experience with the Sitecore XP solution.
• Completed the Developer’s Fundamentals 9.3 Collection of Sitecore eLearning portal.
• Completed the Developer’s Fundamentals 10 Collection from the Sitecore eLearning portal

To pass the Sitecore 10 .NET Developer Certification Exam, you will also need to be proficient in the exam competencies. If you are working for a partner company, you can purchase various study materials free of cost on the eLearning portal. I enrolled myself in an all-access product solution that contains study guides for Developer’s Fundamentals 10 Collection and Developer’s Fundamentals 9.3 Collection.

Exam competencies

To be certified in Sitecore 10 .NET Developer you are expected to have fundamental knowledge, skills, and abilities in seven distinct areas, known as competencies:

Percentage	competency	Number of Questions
12%	Sitecore structure & platform	6
16%	Security & user management	8
20%	Item management	10
10%	Layout & placeholders	5
26%	Components, Controls, & renderings	13
10%	Sitecore Content Serialization	5
6%	Containers	3
100%		50

Exam format

The Sitecore 10 .NET Developer Certification Exam is a multiple-choice exam proctored through Kryterion Webassessor. To pass the exam and earn certification, you must answer at least 80% of the questions correctly. There will be a total of 50 Questions and you will get a total of 100 mins to answer all questions. No negative marking and you will be able to mark a question for review. If you earn lower than the minimum score and want to try again, you will need to repurchase the exam for a full price through Kryterion Webassessor.

Note: The exam and its contents are confidential and proprietary to Sitecore.

Open or closed book
The Sitecore 10 .NET Developer Certification Exam is closed book. You will not be permitted to refer to notes, study guides, training materials, web searches, installations, or other software when taking the exam on Kryterion Webassessor.

Purchasing your exam on Kryterion Webassessor

You must purchase your exam and register for an exam appointment with Kryterion Webassessor. The price of the exam is $350 USD.

To purchase your exam and register for a proctored exam appointment with Kryterion Webassessor, complete the following steps:

1. Review all requirements and rules for Webassessor’s proctored exams prior to purchasing and registering for your exam.
2. Log in to your Sitecore Webassessor account.
   1. If you do not already have an account, create a new account using your business email address as your Webassessor Login ID. 
   2. Your business email address and Webassessor Login ID must match the email associated with your Learning@Sitecore account. 
3. Follow Kryterion’s instructions for purchasing and registering for the Sitecore 10 .NET Developer Certification Exam.
4. You have both options to take the exam: Online Proctored exam or Testing Center Exams.
5. Register for a proctored exam session on Webassessor; we recommend you complete your certification exam within six months from the date of purchase. 

Note the following information:

• If you need to reschedule your proctored exam session, you will need to do so within 72 hours of your appointment. 
• Sitecore exams require either an external or internal web camera.
• Watch this video from Kryterion’s before giving the exam in online proctored mode: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iNWl8d-X8lg

How to prepare for the exam:

Sitecore eLearning Platform: On the Sitecore e-learning platform (learning.sitecore.com), you can enroll yourself in the Sitecore Experience Platform—Technical Product Solution which consists of the following Collections: Developer’s Fundamentals, Sitecore Experience Accelerator, Helix, Java Script Services, and System Administrator. These collections teach you many of the fundamentals of Sitecore, the platform, Sitecore terminology, patterns, and implementations.

Instructor-led online training: On the e-learning platform, you can register for this course Sitecore Experience Solution Developer 9.1. The course focuses on MVC design patterns, Sitecore’s Presentation Architecture, the creation of dynamic presentations, the utilization of the Sitecore API, interactions with visitors to your site, the implementation of search-driven capabilities, and the use of Sitecore Security Architecture, and Sitecore workflows. The purchase of a seat in the Sitecore Experience Solution Developer 9.1 course includes the option to take the Sitecore Developer certification exam.

Additional resources: Have a look at this thread which will provide you with a list of resources to start with Sitecore learning.

Important Topics from each comptetency:

Sitecore structure & platform:

• Sitecore configs, patches, Sitedefinition.config, Layer.config, LoadOrder.
• Install Sitecore Experience Platform on a development workstation without the use of containers. How to resolve if an error occurs while installing through SIA.
• Define Sitecore-specific terminology in a Developer context. Terms include Content Editor, Experience Editor, component, rendering, placeholder, template, layout, item, and serialization.
• Difference between Shared and unversioned fields in data templates.
• Why to create a Sitecore support package?
• Usage of tokens ($name, $date, etc) while creating standard values in templates.

Security & user management

• How to Create users and roles within the Sitecore platform?
• How to unlock a locked user?
• Use role inheritance to simplify role creation and management.
• Configure item workflows for Content Authors, Editors, and Publishers.
• Workflow steps (state, command, action) and workbox.
• Why use the Extranet domain or Sitecore domain.
• How to add users to specific roles?
• How to access CM Sitecore using multiple hostnames?

Item Management

• Recognize the differences between the standard Sitecore databases used, such as Web and Master.
• Tokens usage in Standard values while creating templates.
• Define Sitecore-specific terminology in a Developer context. Terms include standard values, insert options, item GUIDs, fields, field types, source values, inheritance, component definition items, layout definition items, placeholder settings items, and package.
• Add items in multiple areas within the content tree, such as templates, component definition items, layout definition items, and placeholder settings items.
• Create templates and standard values and set insert options to match the data structures outlined in a development plan.
• Use Sitecore packages to transfer Sitecore items and environment changes to another Sitecore environment. 
• Use Sitecore support packages to transfer Sitecore items and environment changes to the Sitecore Support team. 
• How to make the field inline editable in the experience editor and how make disable editing of the field?
• Sitecore.context vs Httpcontext

Layouts & placeholders

• Explain the difference between a static and dynamic placeholder and give the purpose of each.
• Create layout definitions items within Sitecore and set the presentation details for a layout. Shared layout vs Final layout.
• Create a corresponding layout file within your ASP.NET project. 
• Set presentation details on a template item. 
• Create a placeholder settings item.
• Set Allowed controls on a placeholder settings item.
• Define a placeholder on a layout, both dynamically and statically.

Components, Controls, & renderings

• General:
  • Differentiate between the different rendering definition items in Sitecore, such as view, controller, and JSON rendering items.
  • Set the compatible renderings on a rendering definition item.
  • Control component usage by configuring the Datasource Location and Datasource Template fields. 
  • Set up additional control properties and component parameters. 
  • Use caching controls on a rendering item to improve environment performance.
  • Build components that utilize the Rendering Contents Resolver to access additional information from the Sitecore platform, such as content tree structure and system-based templates.
• Sitecore MVC:
  • Create view and controller renderings.
  • Differentiate between static component binding and dynamic component binding with placeholders.
  • Explain the purpose of Sitecore MVC field helpers.
  • Render Sitecore fields as editable in Experience Editor by using Sitecore MVC field helpers. 
• Sitecore ASP.NET Core Rendering SDK:
  • Create and register model-bound view components, custom view components, and partial view components.
  • Explain the purpose of Sitecore tag helpers.
  • Rendering Sitecore fields as editable in Experience Editor by using Sitecore tag helpers in component views.
  • Relation between Content delivery and rendering host

Sitecore Content Serialization

• Locate and connect to the source control location for your development project.  
• Install the Sitecore Command Line Interface (CLI).
• Log in to Sitecore from the CLI.
• Configure a Serialization module with included paths and rules in *.module.JSON
• Execute the CLI commands to push and pull the content items from Sitecore. 
• Use serialization packages for continuous integration.
• Install Sitecore for Visual Studio (SVS).
• Use SVS to push and pull content items from Sitecore.

Containers

• Prepare the files necessary to deploy Sitecore XP to containers.  
• Launch a Sitecore environment with docker-compose. 
• Set up a Sitecore solution with your own Docker images based on Sitecore-provided images.
• Develop and debug within a Sitecore environment running on containers.
• Sitecore container registry contains all images of base Sitecore installation for production and development environment.

Review

Prior to appearing for Sitecore 10 exam, I have already passed Sitecore previous versions of exams (Sitecore 8, 9) and I can clearly see lots of improvements in the type of questions, and pattern of the exam. Earlier there were lots of questions that were paragraph-based and required lots of reading, also many snippets based as well. But in this latest exam, most of the questions are straight forward which tests your grasp on the each competency. There was no question that require you to remember anything (definition-based), almost all the questions were real scenario-based. I would say the level of the exam is Moderate to difficult because to pass the exam you will have to secure 80% marks means you can only give the wrong answers to 10 questions out of 50 questions. If you have hands-on experience in Sitecore development (at least 1 year) and you have knowledge of the latest Sitecore topics like CLI, Containers, and Headless development, you can easily get more than 90% marks. There were 3-4 questions that were tricky and the options were confusing, I’d recommend marking such questions for review during the exam and guess based on understanding.

That’s all about the certification exam. Reach out to me if you have any other questions about the exam.