JK,

I highly agree with one of your comments and have some issues with another.

First, the good news, or at least the point I agree with. The FP to VFP conversion. I remember being at a traveling roadshow for VFP3. Someone at the show, who happened to be responsible for one of the local user groups, was totally hung up on the fact that there was no longer a SPR type file that he could go into and look at the code behind the form. The "I want total control" syndrom. I don't need no stinkin Report writer (@ say, gets baby), Form Generator, Menu Generator, etc. Pretty much a lame excuse for not having to learn new technology IMO.

I also find the VFP community to be skewed older than something like VB. So the community is naturally going to be more resistant to change. The last place I worked at, most of the programs were written by one of the owners. An older guy with a scientific background. Never trained at all in the programming discipline. His programs were all written for himself. He had no idea how to structure an application so someone else could actually understand what he was trying to do. My guess is that there's a lot of these type of folk still out there doing some form of FP/VFP work

Next point is your comment about certification. First, I don't think software certification is worth that much in the marketplace. Second, the corporate environment would be the one place that certification would have any value. And as I've stated before, at least here in Los Angeles, corporate VFP development is nil. Totally dried up. VFP has been in maintenance mode for at least the last 2 years here. Its even gotten lower over the last year. At this time last year I could expect to find 50-70 VFP jobs on Dice.com for the LA area. Now its 30-40. And a portion of those are "VFP knowledge a plus" type jobs, they still have a VFP app in maintenance mode.

Bottem line, at least for me, certification was never a serious consideration.

PF

>>Most experienced VFP developers that I know can bitch-slap VB developers in terms of an almost intuitive feel for how an application should be structured. But they fail to architect it well because they can't get out of the box.
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>Turnout for the VFP certification tests has been far less than hoped. Why? Beats me, but there was one opportunity to "get with the program" that was missed. How many more can we ignore and expect to be respected by MS and everyone else?
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>The Fox community, sadly, is still recovering from the FP to VFP conversion. That's pretty lame. Lamer still is the "man in the high castle" attitude in which Fox developers allow their markets to shrink because they don't feel a need to expand their toolsets and, thus, individual market presense. This is one area in which VB developers have an advantage....they never suffered from the illusion that VB could do everything: They always had to turn to external tools for data storage, et al. So the more experienced of their folks developed the proper approach to systems development.