SNIP
>There will be a certification exam.

WHEN? Microsoft has been promising a new VFP exam for months now. By retiring the old VFP 3 exam, I took it as a sure sign that the VFP 6 exam was right around the corner. Boy, was I wrong.

>It will be tested and retested to ensure that it means more than just being able to parrot the official party line.

Thank god for that. Lately, the official party line has been "We don't recommend using VFP for anything other than legacy applications. Do all of your new development in VB and VC, use the Web tools even when they're not appropriate, and don't ask any of our trainers, presenters, and marketers about VFP: they don't know what they're talking about"

>And MS is putting a lot of effort into the project.

That statement borders on a bald-faced lie. If you put a lot of effort into something, you usually don't wait until a major conference to announce "Sorry to all of you who were expecting something. We're no closer to a beta exam today than we were six months ago." Again, no disrespect to the developers who helped write the questions at DevCon (I didn't go, so I can't judge), but isn't that the sort of thing that should have been addressed months ago, so at DevCon, there at least could have been a more positive announcement? By waiting until then, this shows a LACK of effort to get results in a timely manner.

>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.

Of that I have no doubt. Developers wrote the questions, based on their existing knowledge of FoxPro. However, not every developer knows everything about VFP, and damn few of them know what Microsoft has in mind for the future of FoxPro. When I took the VFP 3 pracice exam, I had to learn parts of FoxPro which I frankly didn't use in my day-to-day work. I did not see the sense of it at the time, but I now realize that this was how Microsoft wanted to place the product. By having to learn elements of the produc which I hadn't been exposed to, I became a better developer, and I got a glimpse at what Microsoft was going to be doing with VFP: more ActiveX, tighter integration with the rest of Visual Studio, heavy on the ODBC.

By having an exam which is primarily the ideas of developers, I know I will get exposure to some elements of VFP 6 which I don't normally use. However, this will test the stronger points of FoxPro, the ones that everyone knows (or should know). What about some of the lesser-known and less-robust features? If we do things the Microsoft way, we can make up for FoxPro's shortcomings with other Visual Studo products, and therefore never pursue learning how a particular solution could have been implemented with FoxPro. I'm not saying that we HAVE to do everything under the sun with VFP, but for a certification exam, we better know HOW to do it.

Again, pardon the rant. I'm just sick and tired of seeing the words "under development, under consideration, being evaluated, coming soon" perpetually attached to anything FoxPro related. With Microsoft's past, the written phrase "coming soon" has the unwritten clause "if at all."

Bill Yater
ex-VFP MCP