Very good points! Everything is a trade-off. :thumbsup:

Unfortunately the corporate IT gestapo gives me a load of crap every time I want to use third-party software. For open source / freeware I just use it and beg forgiveness if I get caught. This is what happened when they discovered I was using Inno Setup. They wanted me to stop using it, but by that time it had been used for all of our products for years. Purchased software is a PITA because they evaluate it, don't like it, and then offer an alternative that doesn't do what I need. For this reason, I usually roll my own for this sort of thing. Software Zen: delete this;

trønderen wrote: 'cigar box' PC I had to look that up, but Google didn't return much with that terminology. :-) I suspect you mean one of those small PCs, barely 5x5 inches (if that big). I have a few of those, and love them to the point where I loaded two of them with 64GB of RAM - they're both dedicated to running VMs (I use them rather extensively for work). But even "only" 16GB should be plenty for his one app.

So stringing things together is great? Then you should try Lisp.

Done. Will Rogers never met me.

Only if there is a specific reason to do so. One use case is that there are a lot of friends of the main class but I want tighter control over users of the embedded class.

will have to look into this. I used to use a product from SciTools, but they got stupid expensive. Guess they decided the small developer market was irrelevant. I don't have a problem paying $1200 for a product. Forcing me to do it every dang year? I don't think so. Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.

I hope it was a joke as the provided link contradicts “1988” in the first paragraph. Quote: The C# programming language was designed by Anders Hejlsberg from Microsoft in 2000 and was later approved as an international standard by Ecma (ECMA-334) in 2002

Interesting view. At least for books (printed) in the US it is well established that lending a book to another is fair use. It is similar to lending someone a screw driver. Same issue arose when places started renting movies on tape/dvd. In the US that was settled by requiring that stores purchase it at a much higher price. Depending on what period of time one looks at newspapers (printed) they vary making money from actually buying the paper, to ramping up on advertising revenue and then now, at least in the US for most major papers, trying to squeeze every penny out of diminishing readership. Certainly for much of that time reading it in a library was not considered a problem that I ever heard about. The ads that were not in the inserts were still there. I have read newspapers in a library - I cannot recall ever seeing inserts. Microfiche newspapers also contained the ads. But one could suppose the sale price no longer applied.

That was never a problem when I was actively programming, and I believe that was extended as part of their adoption of OOP with version 5.5+. Back in those days, testing was performed by setting up instruments with string commands, then triggering them with events generated by the test code. Reports were collected by reading instrument registers, so string length was never an issue. I was happy with the introduction of named Calls at the time, as everything the company I worked for used procedure calls that had numbers, and the only way to find out how to call them with parameters was to beg the Systems Programming group for documentation on a particular Call. Strange times, and everything was proprietary and dynamic; it wasn't unusual to use three programming languages on one Project. We are so very much better off today! Will Rogers never met me.

MAUI, perhaps?  That could make your desktop app be (relatively easily) ported to MacOS. /ravi My new year resolution: 2048 x 1536 Home | Articles | My .NET bits | Freeware ravib(at)ravib(dot)com

I started programming before OWL existed (my first IDE was Turbo Pascal for CP/M on an Apple //e back in the early 80's). I went through Pascal (OWL), C++ (MFC), and then C# (WinForms, and currently WPF). I refuse to code for WinUI, simply because I have no desire to learn it. It took me a while to accept WPF (and I fought it HARD), but I find it easy to do (easier than WinForms in a lot of ways). I do all of my design work in the XAML editor (you can drag from the Toolbox pane to the XAML to get a new control on the page, and intellisense guides you when you start changing properties in the XAML, so it's not TOO bad). After two years away from desktop apps, I spent the last weekend doing a WPF version (proof of concept) of our web app from work, and the hardest part was making the app allow the user to adjust font size with Ctrl+ and Ctrl- like a web browser (we have to comply with Section 508 by allowing the font in an application to be increased by up to 200%). A few years ago, I wrote a custom message box library that allows the developer to specify text size and custom colors (among other features), and with a little tweaking, my message boxes use the increased font size. ".45 ACP - because shooting twice is just silly" - JSOP, 2010 ----- You can never have too much ammo - unless you're swimming, or on fire. - JSOP, 2010 ----- When you pry the gun from my cold dead hands, be careful - the barrel will be very hot. - JSOP, 2013

thanks for the info. I bought this kindle version of book. diligent hands rule....

Don't tell William Shatner! Latest Articles: A Lightweight Thread Safe In-Memory Keyed Generic Cache Collection Service A Dynamic Where Implementation for Entity Framework

Your app's connector could not connect to the database host, or it connected and failed authentication. TLS is a transport protocol, a newer version of handshaking or validating in more detail. TLS last I checked is at V1.3, and V1.0, V1.1 was discontinued, but that was years ago. If your database is hosted at home or in your shop, then that's a local connection, and could be a firewall blocking a port number for MySQL. If your using a cloud host, then perhaps they upgraded. But if you wrote the app personally, you should remember how that part works, and be able to fix it fairly quickly. EF has nothing to do with the connection to the database server. You can use Fiddler to watch the connection, or check error logs, there is something out there that will guide you. If it ain't broke don't fix it Discover my world at jkirkerx.com

Call me. I know FORTRAN. I know it so well that it is not Fortran :) Charlie Gilley “They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.” BF, 1759 Has never been more appropriate.

Hmm. It requires a license key (good for one year only) and has an annual revenue cap of US $5,000. Compare & contrast to Visual Studio Community Edition, which may be used in enterprises with fewer than 250 PCs and with an annual revenue cap of US $1,000,000. This is basically a trial edition with slightly better terms. I can't imagine why people aren't breaking down the doors to download it. /s Freedom is the freedom to say that two plus two make four. If that is granted, all else follows. -- 6079 Smith W.

I did a quick scan and it fitted a typical ChatGPT article. The medium website is riddled with them. Graeme "I fear not the man who has practiced ten thousand kicks one time, but I fear the man that has practiced one kick ten thousand times!" - Bruce Lee