>>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.
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The final tally had Wil Hentzen with the most entries accepted at 13, I had 11, Jim Booth 10, and John Koziol put in 8. I think only two or three of the top 10
weren't UT regulars.
More importantly for the VFP community, the DevCon attendees had over 120 questions accepted by MS, more than what Microsoft had originally set as a goal. I think that the developer community made a good impression with the MS Test Development team.
Microsoft didn't have us doing this on our own - we got a huge hand from Microsoft product leaders and copy editors, who worked every bit as hard to ensure that the submissions were solid contributions spread over the whole spectrum of VFP.
As to the issue of how long it takes to get the questions put together, tremendous effort was put into figuring out just what objectives were important to certification as a VFP developer in many roles before DevCon. And putting together questions that are grammatically correct, clear in their objectives and not just a matter of memorization is
hard work. It wasn't unusual to have to spend over an hour getting a question ready to present - and then the editors and product managers worked with us on our submissions to get them in shape, often spending as much time reworking our questions with us as we spent putting them together in the first place.
And not every question was accepted...
There will be a certification exam. It will be tested and retested to ensure that it means more than just being able to parrot the official party line. And MS is putting a lot of effort into the project.
If you don't want to believe MS, at least believe the people on UT who kicked butt and took names while trying to get a quality test ready. This certification test is not being back-burnered, and will be a good measure of a developer's knowledge of VFP and the process of designing, writing, testing and deploying products.
