I guess I was comparing my own experience in the "dark ages" where Personal computers 1302 split up the semester into thrids, one third was dbase, another was spreadsheets (lotus?) and the other was the word procressor (Wordstar)
For those of us who arrived at the splitting of the highway, the big bucks guys went mainframe, and others of us went PC.
(I still think it was the best choice :-))
There was a local community college here that taught foxPro for a few years (two whole semesters) becasue the language is still extensively used in these parts in the banking, insurance, and medical industries. This is not to mention my own forte, that is, the DoD stuff.

For the past several years, we were recruiting CS and MIS graduates, and I was conducting classes to train our own programmers, however, the bean counters have gotten into the act and we do not offer training any more. New hires are expected to do their studying on personal time, not as a writtern requirement, but to "demonstrate committment" or something, I think I heard from one of th4e manager types.

And, I agree with you, I wouldn't want to see exam guides rushed to the shelves either, however FoxPro is not new, and there are already exam guides out for the other products in Visual studio. My comment was along the lines of my thinking that MS considered VFP a step-child..

But so much for my rant.
I apologize if anyone was offended.


>In thinking about this, I don't know how any university could teach VFP effectively. You have to have a pretty good background in a lot of different areas: Data Design, OOP, Programming Structures. If a University used VFP for all of these things there would not be much exposure to other languages. I think that it may be easier (on the students and the staff) to each the concept courses using tools that just do a couple of things. Once you gain the understanding of how to do something, the language doesn't really matter. I graduated college knowing a little COBOL, PASCAL, RBASE and Basic. Most of my work was done on mainframes and I didn't even know how to change a directory on a PC. Once I got over the OS hurdle, learning FP (granted version 1.0) was nothing.
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>At the same time, the universities are not going to make any money running semester courses for "live" developers. We just don't have the time to learn is small segments like that even though it is probably better.
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>>There are certification exams, but there are NO exam guides or training cirriculum available anywhere, with the sole exception of Jim Booth's crash courses at his facility.
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>Whil has announced plans for the Certification Exam study guide, so that is a start. The VFP exams are only about a year old and VFP developers and writers are not willing to put out quick books to get them on the shelf. VFP developers are proud and will take the time to get it right. Unfortunately that means waiting.
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>FWIW, I agree with a lot of the other things that you said. These were the only two points that I had any thoughts on. :-)