Rich -
someone may have covered this before - but here goes my stab at it:

1. Name a few things in the VFP object model
2. VFP is an OOP language - what are the 3 main characteristics of an OOP language??
3. How is a collection important when drilling around a pageframe?
4. Ok - it works only on that printer and no other - how do you fix it?
5. I usually give a one pager of a requirements doc to write a form with a textbox holding a date value (and defaulting to today's date], with 2 command buttons on the form. Click OK - get a messagebox echoing back the contents of the text box, Click quit - the form destroys itself from memory. I then take it a bit further and ask em to turn it into a compiled executable that I can click on in Windows Explorer. I also ask for an event handler, and an error handler. PPL who write apps know this stuff, users who run queries do not.
6. Ever used the treeview in VFP? How do ya bind the imagelist?
7. I usually ask about what kind of vertical markets they've been exposed to, then ask them to come up with a 2 table representation of something that they can use to show me a parent/child relation, or a master/child, or a one-to-many relation. I usually add in a few more columns after they are done. Then I have 3 sql select statments I ask them to write based on these two tables. ALL ON PAPER. I interview both VFP and VB candidates, so the answers are a bit varied with the syntax.
8. OK - you're stuck - where do you go and who do you ask? Name your last mentor and explain how he/she helped you over a hump.
9. Belong to ACM? AITP? IEEE? What did you do at the last chapter meeting?
10. You went to a school that had a student chapter of ACM/AITP/DPMA/IEEE - did you join? Did you participate? Hold any office? Go to any national event? [I'm looking for some kind of interest in professional programming as a career here - and if they DID something, it might be an indication to me that they ARE interested in being a professional programmer].
11. When's the last time you did anything with your local VFP user group?
12. There are two ways to access remote data via odbc in VFP to some back end data repository - name them. [I do a LOT of client/server app programming, my teams do the same, so this is important to me]
13. [arcane] Who came up with the Function Point for FoxPro, why is it important, and when is the last time you computed a metric using Function Point Computational Analysis? [sorry - this one is dear to me - my senior project thesis was entitled "An xBase related digital voice processing system with addtional software metrics"]

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If you'd like the answers to my Q's please send me an email to wsanders@advmed.com

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hth - mondo regards [Bill]
>Looking for questions to ask an alleged FoxPro/VFP programmer. Not trick questions, not MCP/MCSE etc., trying to think how to determine quickly whether a programmer really knows Fox. So far I know I want to ask:
>1) Discuss Rushmore
>2) (given structure) Write a command to create an index tag
>3) (given requirements) Write an SQL SELECT
>4) Write a UDF to return this, given that.
>I'm hoping that someone besides me has written a test they're willing to share. Of course I'd choose questions from it which emphasize what's important to me, and maybe add some of my own... I know someone (Whil Hentzen?) has published an article of questions he used to use to determine how much experience they had, such as "what version did this feature appear in?"
>TIA, Rich Addison
>P.S. - Hi Charlie