Microsoft’s Second Chance will allow you to do so.  But just make sure you register before you purchase the exam.  They will give you a voucher number that will allow you to “cash in” your free second chance.  Here is what Microsoft has to say:

In the real world, you might need more than one chance at certification. With Second Shot, if you do not pass a Microsoft Certification exam on your first try, we’ll let you retake the exam for free.

As an additional incentive to work toward a Microsoft Certification, from October 15, 2008, to December 31, 2008, if you pass a Microsoft Certification exam on your first try, you get a 25 percent discount on a different exam.

Follow these three easy steps:

*WARNING*
Make sure you register BEFORE you purchase the exam, or else this offer will not be valid.
*WARNING*

Hopefully you will not need it, but it’s good insurance, and a good way to get a free “practice test”.

If anyone is in my position, I think this information may help you.  First, before you sign up for any classes, make sure you are familiar with whichever language you choose to focus on (I am choosing C# due to the close relationship of syntax with Java).  I have received two books to teach myself what I need to know before I go to any class or do any practice tests.  These two books are: MCTS Self-Paced Training Kit (Exam 70-536) Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 Application Development Foundation and Programming Microsoft ASP.NET 3.5.  The second edition for the Self-Paced Training Kit you can pre-order, but I am not able to wait for it to be released.  Start off with the Training Kit book, and then move on to the ASP.NET book because of the way they are structured and the indepthness of the first one.

To go along with these books, I would suggest purchasing a membership for at least a year to the site LearnVisualStudio.Net.  It has been highly recommended by some .NET Developers that I know and it looks to have a very large amount of tutorials already made, as well as ongoing videos.

After I get a good grasp of the material from these 3 sources, I am going to take a practice test to see how I fare for the 2 exams for the MCTS.  If I feel the need, I will take a class for each exam (I believe they are 2 or 3 days long) and give feedback to those that are interested.  If you have any further websites or learning sources, feel free to post them in the comments.

Books: They are cheap and can be taken anywhere for learning.  Bad thing is that you do not have much direction besides reading straight through and cannot ask for help on the book (some come with forum discussion areas, but feedback is not guaranteed to be fast, easily understood, or correct).

Online Training: Cost is higher, but these series of courses (to prepare for a certain exam) are scheduled to take a really long time.  While you do get some feedback and can ask questions, if time is a factor in your decision, probably one of the worst ways to train.

Classes: If you complete the prerequisties, classes are the fastest way to learn.  Instructors that are certified know exactly what you are needing to work on for the exams, give great pointers, and will answer any questions you may have.  Downside is that they are the most expensive way to learn and if you are starting, the prerequisties probably have their own classes (which leads to even more money having to be spent).

Vocational, Community College: While these classes may give you a better understanding and allow for quick feedback, they are basically in the same basket as online courses, except you can’t choose what time of the day to work on the class like you can with online classes.

Online Videos/Tutorials: These can come from places such as Microsoft.com, or be hosted on third party non-affiliated websites to show you how to start application development from scratch.  These should be mixed in with any variety of training methods you choose due to their short time, and (most of the time) free of charge while providing useful information for our knowledge enhancing.

So needless to say, I am going to approach these exams in a structured manner.  I am going to first get the books and read/practice code/syntax and get a solid grasp of the language and structure before I move on to the next method.  Throughout the training process, I am going to mix in tutorials and online videos to see how a professional instructor or programmer organizes and writes their application.  I believe after this, I will take a class and learn within the time (2 days to a week normally) before I take the exam.  Another helpful thing: practice exams.  Take these to make sure you are ready to take the actual exam, because nothing is a bigger waste of money than going into an exam and not knowing where your skill level resides.  If anyone has any suggestions or other combinations, please let me know.

Let’s get into some hard evidence now. From the Associated Press I bring you two snippets of articles. Author ANICK JESDANUN wrote the article, “A leading printer maker wants to help you do less printing.“. Two excerpts from the article are:

The Web software also extends the “printer-friendly” features many sites offer. Often those printer-friendly versions still carry logos and other graphics; the Lexmark tools let you eliminate those as well.
…
Lexmark has versions available for both Microsoft Corp.’s Internet Explorer and Mozilla’s Firefox browsers.

The Firefox version offers more functions. Lexmark says Firefox users tend to be more technically advanced, and thus open to more customization. While the Internet Explorer tool lets you eliminate images, for instance, the Firefox version lets you remove forms, links and other elements, too.

Read the last paragraph? Need I say more? Probably not, but here is another example from author JORDAN ROBERTSON who wrote the article,”Researchers offer new way to avoid bogus Web sites“. Here is a snippet from their article:

Intercepting Internet traffic, and spying on the communication between two computers, is a gold mine for hackers. Now Carnegie Mellon University researchers hope software they’ve built will make it harder for criminals to hit that jackpot.
The software, a free download for use with latest version of the Firefox Web browser, creates an additional way for people to verify whether the site they’re trying to visit is authentic.

Simply put, the researchers are Carnegie Mellon were able to implement a solution to their findings quickly through Firefox because it is open source. No mention of Internet Explorer is stated in the article.

The new version of IE8 beta is released, and looks to be some competition to Firefox. But by the time the stable version is released, my guess is that whatever security features and extra functions are to win back market share for Internet Explorer 8, Firefox will have already included it in a release or tweaked it so it works a little better.

These 3 are very useful shortcuts for removing files, quickly changing open programs, and quickly killing a program instead of having to navigate to the “X” to close it.  ALT+F4 (meaning hit the ALT key and then the Function 4 key (F4) at the same time) is useful when a program hides the usual minimize, maximize, and close buttons at the top right of the window.  Next on the list is basic formatting shortcuts.

These are great for any word processing program you use (helps when you switch from Office 2003 to 2007 and have no clue where Microsoft decided to put any button). 

The first 4 shortcuts are also useful for Windows Explorer so that you can cut/copy/paste/and undo moving files and folders around (CTRL+Y may “redo” the undo that you might have invoked) as shown below:

You can normally add Ctrl+F to open the find dialog box to search for specific files.  F2 is great for renaming files quickly (but for renaming a lot of files or removing characters %,@,!,#,$, whitespaces, etc. I would suggest downloading a renaming tool).

Next we have a few more commands:

The select all items is a great shortcut which I use all the time in conjunction with Ctrl+C or Ctrl+X (cut or copy, respectively).

These are actually the ones that weird people out the most.  They invoke that “How did you do that?” reaction.  If I have a bunch of open windows on my screens and need to get to something on my desktop, Windows Logo+D is my goto command.

There are also commands for your web browser (such as CTRL+T to start a new tab in FireFox and IE7, as well as CTRL+Tab to scroll through those tabs).  Again, for the complete list of keyboard shortcuts for the Windows OS, go here.