The word on the street is that lots of people were disappointed about missing the beta for exam 70-620: Windows Vista, Configuring; the "big Vista" exam (in its beta state, the number is 71-620). We're sorry if you are one of those people--we'd love to have everyone interested get to participate but unfortunately we can't pull it off.

In the case of 620, there was so much interest in the beta for 620 that the seats filled up ridiculously fast. A lot of people missed out, including MSFT employees, MCTs and MCPs, MVPs, and some of our biggest customers (that's a lot of loud lobbying, fyi), so we opened up another set of seats. Those, too, filled up immediately.

Some background on betas, if you're interested:

• betas are open by invite only--candidates are chosen based on their exam history or other experience so the feedback we get is applicable and can be used to finalize the exam
• Microsoft Learning sends an e-mail invite with registration code to selected candidates
• Weird twist: even if you're selected to participate, you won't GET the invitation unless you're subscribed to the MCP newsletter. This is because of Microsoft's strict privacy rules--we have to send our programmatic mail through an official channel so we can cross-check customers' contact preferences
• just getting the invite doesn't guarantee a seat in the beta. they sometimes fill up so we recommend you reserve your seat immediately.
• participation caps are set based on rules for data/feedback needed in developing an exam (it's worth mentioning that MSL does pay for each beta exam taken--another factor in setting registration caps!)
• If you'd like to be included in future betas, please review the info here: http://www.microsoft.com/learning/mcpexams/status/beta.asp

Really good info on why/how we run betas here: http://vishaljoshi.blogspot.com/2005/11/microsoft-beta-exams.html