The LA Fox Developer Newsletter

XPro User Group News (Con't from page 6)

has led me to see that the primary force behind their switching was the need to attract new business and FoxPro is generally perceived to have more market force behind it.

So anyway, given this general need for most developers to concentrate on one tool at time, I wouldn’t think an Xbase plus PowerBuilder group would be terribly successful.<EBG> (Even Bigger Grin)

Hot Off the Wire

(Ed. Note: From time-to-time, we will be publishing notes of interest that have recently appeared on CompuServe. If you run across any that you think might be interesting to the group or is related to one of our members, please forward them to Barry Lee, CID# 72 723,3422.]

Undocumented FoxPro

Aaron Fessler submitted the following tip on resizing windows to the Polarbear Foxpro mailing list:

I just happened to stumble upon a feature in 2.5b DOS that isn’t in the documentation. I called MicroSoft and the tech support guy said he didn’t have any information on it. He also gave the standard line about it possibly not being supported in future versions, etc. ad infinitum, et nausea.

The command is:

SIZE WINDOW <winname>,

TO <expNl>, <expN2> I BY <expN3>,<expN4>

I’ve tried this command in Foxpro 2.0, and 2.5x, and it works in all these versions.

FoxPro Certification

by Barry R. Lee

It all started innocently enough, was passed a piece of information by Bill Anderson:

“Lisa Brummel to Steven Davies, #653179 on FoxForum, sent Sunday, May 1, 1994

“re: FoxPro Certification

“We will have FoxPro certification for the next version of FoxPro. This issues surrounding the lack of current certification have more to do with the wealth of qualified trainers that currently do Fox training. We have been struggling with a way to “certify” them while balancing the various methods that each uses to successfully teach FoxPro or consult on FoxPro. This is not a snub, we are trying to be as fair as possible to the current crowd of FP experts. As you know, these folks are only beginning to exist for Access as well as

VB.

“We are working this out and will have something for all in the next version.

I started investigating further and found that this is one of THE hot topics on CompuServe’s FoxForum. There seem to be a lot of pros and cons regarding the issue of certification and Microsoft’s Certified Professional (CP) credentialing system. Even the “pro’s” can’t seem to agree on some of the issues, as illustrated by the following excerpts from the currently running CompuServe thread:

Nancy Jacobsen - “. . .l’ve been thinking about this a lot and it seems to me that one of the fundamental objections to certification (although not perhaps explicitly expressed) is the fact that once a competency test of any kind exists, then by default anybody who hasn’t passed that test is questionable with regards to their competency. ... certification can be an awfully big can of worms if it isn’t handled very carefully and it won’t be just a can of worms for us but for Microsoft as well. . . .lf somebody I respect comes back from it and says ‘hey that was a good test — you really learn a lot from it’ then I’ll probably take it to see how good I am for my own satisfaction.”

(Con't, page 8)

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