I originally started my Sharepoint development using Sharepoint Designer, but quickly found that doesn’t give you much in the way of deployment features.  It seems to only be beneficial when you can work directly on your “production” site.  I’ve found creating packages in Visual Studio and using the Sharepoint Extension “Deploy” function to create the solution to be much more powerful.

I wanted to do everything from within VS and be able to easily create and deploy the solution.   The app should be created just like an asp.net app, but take advantage of the Sharepoint context and security features.  I found a couple good posts that really got me started down the path to answering my question.
CJ’s – http://claytonj.wordpress.com/2008/04/13/sharepoint-code-behind-demo-using-vsewss11/
Chris Johnson’s – http://blogs.msdn.com/cjohnson/archive/2006/09/05/740498.aspx (option 4)

Using these ideas, I created a Blank Sharepoint project.  Then by creating asp.net pages (as modules) and code-behind class files, I can create fully functional asp.net pages, with the benefit of the Visual Studio designer. 

I originally deployed the asp.net project dll to the Sharepoint site’s bin directory.  This caused a Sharepoint code-access security error when trying to access the Sharepoint object model (spweb, splist, etc).  I found a solution that said to modify the site’s web to config to allow medum (instead of minimal) access, but that seemed like too much of a risk.  The solution I decided on was to just deploy the asp.net project’s dll to the GAC, which allows full trusted access to the Sharepoint objects.

I studied for the 528 using the MS Press training kit book for a couple weeks.  I read the book, cover to cover, and then took the practice exams included in the book.  I regularly scored around 90% on the practice exams, which is about the score I received on the actual exam.  If anybody has any comments on preperation strategies that worked for them, please let me know.