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 busi-

ness 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 quali-

fied 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 compe-

tency 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 care-

fully 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)

Page 7