>>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.
>>
>
>Bill, I'm sure you know more about it than the people working on it. If you don't believe me, OK, I'm a useless, brainwashed Microsoft syncophant, and I can't convince you otherwise. When Microsoft is satisfied that they've got a quality product, and put it through its paces with poeople at all skill levels, I'm sure they'll say something. But to you, it'll just be vaporware and completely useless.
>
>For the rest of the people interested, it's in the works, the people who are working on it are under an NDA in any case, and I've probably said more than I should. It's not coming out next week, but I'd expect to get some sort of official; announcement at some point within measurable time.
>
>And no, Bill, I won't address it or your frustrations further. Like I said, if you don't trust MS, and you don't trust the UT people involved in the project, it's a waste of electrons answering you.

Ed,

Please understand that it's not a question of not trusting Microsoft or the UT members, and since I am so far removed from the MS inner circle that I need a road map to find Redmond, I obviously don't know everything that's going on with the test development.

However, look at it from exactly that perspective. Most of my VFP information comes from this forum and the Microsoft Web Site. There has been a lot of speculation and conjecture on this forum about the timing of the exam, and even the second-hand quotes from Rob Green have been somewhat vague. I try to get as much information as possible from the horse's mouth, the Microsoft certification website. Having the one and only VFP certification test retired before a new one is even close to beta can be a little disconcerting. I was really hoping that by now, almost a year since VFP 6.0 hit the streets, there would at least be a beta exam. I'm seriously worried that by the time the VFP 6 exam goes gold, it will have a limited life, eclipsed by the release of VFP 7 and changes it will bring.

Of course I would rather wait for a comprehensive exam than have a half-assed exam that will bestow a meaningless certification. But a happy medium would be even better. Release the desktop exam, which will probably have a lot less on it that the distributed exam. Let the developers cut their teeth on that, a fully-relaized certification of using VFP as a stand-alone product. Use the results and reactions from that exam to polish up the distributed exam, and release it a few months (not more then 4) later. Think of the desktop exam as
part 1 of a 2-part certification. I know I will be using the lessons learned in the desktop exam to improve my preparation for the distributed exam.

Bill