>>This may have already been asked by someone, but I didn't see anything in the thread titles.
>>
>>Has anything been mentioned at DevCon about when the VFP 6.0 exam(s) will be put into beta, and/or when they will be in general release? Is it going to be before the end of October, when everyone's VFP 3.0 certification runs out? Are they waiting for VFP 7.0 before releasing the exam?
>>
>>Thanks,
>>
>>Bill
>
>One of the activities MS has had here at DevCon is training for writing test questions. Attendees of the training are then encouraged to write test questions. Since this is a fairly difficult chore, the offered gifts for every 3 questions you get accepted. Development of the test will continue through the year with something ready to go by the end of this year according to MS at the Keynote address Sunday night.
>
>Your fellow UTers have been extrememely successful at getting their questions approved. We are going to post an update to this progress later. John Koziol, Jim Booth, Ed Rauh and I are in the top 7 so far. The other 3 are Calvin Hsia, Drew Speedie, and someone else I can not remember.


Let me see if I've got this right: Microsoft announced the retirement of the VFP 3.0 exam a year ago. They've been advertising that the VFP 6.0 exams would be "coming soon" since Visual Studio 6 came out. For the past few months, various people within Microsoft (Rob Green, for example) have been saying that the exam was close to beta and would be in general availabiltiy sometime in late 1999.

Now I'm hearing that they're STILL LOOKING FOR QUESTIONS? It's the middle of June, almost the middle of th year, and almost a full year since VFP 6.0 hit the streets. At best, assuming no delays (which never happens with Microsoft), the beta will be available by the end of July or the beginning of August. Figure a 4-week beta testing period (that is, a 4-week window during which we can take the beta exam). That puts us at the middle or end of August. If we can use the 70-100 exam as a guideline, the real exam will not be available for 4 to 6 months after the beta exam is closed. This means that if everything goes well, Microsoft MIGHT have a VFP certification exam ready by the end of the year or the beginning of 2000. Of course, they don't have to prepare just one exam: there's the Desktop Apps exam and the Distributed Apps exam, which if their names are any indication, will be testing quite different skill sets (beyond the basic core knowledge of Visual FoxPro), and have to be developed more or less independently of each other. Tack on another 2 to 3 months for that level of complexity, and this puts us at the end of 1Q2000 or the beginning of 2Q2000.

That tears it! I was patient when a VFP 5.0 certification test was a perpetual no-show, trying to ignore the "fox is dead" indication that this gave. I finally relented and took the VFP 3 cert in September 1997, having to learn a version of the software which I'd never even used (I started working witht eh VFP5 beta, and never looked back). I shuddered a bit when they retired the VFP exam last year, but was confident that a VFP 6 exam would be released before my certification expired in October 1999. I've read the messages discussing the questionable meaning of the VFP exam (for a while, it was thought that the VFP exams would not count as part of the core exams) and gritted my teeth. I've sat through the interminable delays in getting anyone from Microsoft to commit to even a semi-reliable release date for even the beta exam. Now I read that they're still preparing the exams, resorting to having the developers from outside Microsoft write their own questions (No insult meant to anyone. It just astounds me that Microsoft, the company that wrote the damn program, and who is the final arbiter of what they consider to be an acceptable level of competence in it, couldn't get this done with their own people).

Obviously, my certification isn't worth the paper it's printed on. I'm the only person on my team that's VFP certified, and for all the good it does me, I might as well not be. Being certified in 3-year old, 3-version old technology is meaningless, and waiting around for Microschmucks to get their thumb out of their...ear...and realize that not everyone considers VB, VC, and SQL Server the only languages that attach respect and a high price tag to certification. I NEED to be certified in order to get to a certain level of promotion, and even if I don't want the promotion, I get a guaranteed salary increase for every exam I pass, not to mention the (assumed) prestige that comes along with it. Frankly, though, it's just not worth the hassle and the angst anymore.

Sorry about the rant, but I was hoping and praying that DevCon was going to be the time and place where Micosoft released the beta exam, with the idea of having the final exam by the end of the third quarter. When and if the VFP exam does arrive, forget about me taking it. What's the point of giving Microsoft another $100 of my money, not to mention the time and money I would spend buying books, taking practice exams, and studying obscure, little-used-by-me points of FoxPro, just to have my certification treated like an honorable mention behind the win-place-show prizewinners of VB, VC, and SQL? Promotion and raise be damned, at least until I get my VB certification, which actually means something.

Bill Yater
ex-MCP