:thumbsup: very useful and thanks also to the gentleman suggesting an event handler approach; may code be forever cleaner and more readable with error handling out of the way :-D

Might want to check out http://creately.com/[^]

When I'm not writing in a .NET language I use a cross platform editor too, Vim. It has a "modeline" feature where you can put a special line in (beginning with your language's comment char) that specifies the tab stop

:: Windows batch/cmd script example, typically the last line in a file
:: shiftwidth specifies the width of auto-indenting
:: vim:tabstop=4:shiftwidth=4:noexpandtab

# Perl example

vim:tabstop=4:shiftwidth=4:noexpandtab

Another popular cross platform editor (probably friendlier than Vim for a VS user), emacs, has a substantially similar capability though I personally do not know its syntax. Happily, vim also has the "retab" command so if someone sends me a file indented with spaces I can typically fix that in an instant :-\ Vin also has all number of features for auto expanding tabs with spaces, making the backspace key delete n number of spaces, etc... (and I'm reasonably confident that emacs mirrors this capability) so my main point is people should use whatever they want and fix the indenting to the project's code formatting rules before commit. Let your editor empower you! Hopefully someday I will figure out how to embed vim into VS which it can supposedly do.:cool:

I knew I recognized that name from somewhere. _Code_ FTW!

Must be real "interesting" to be caught in the middle of such politics ;) As someone else in this thread said at length, it really will come down to the competency of the admins. I agree the Linux admins are, in general, horrific at setting up and configuring and windows box. It works the other way around too. It takes years of experience to become good with all the little quirks and niggles of each platform. For example, the Linux admins no doubt are familiar with scripting writes to certain areas of /proc (or is it /sys today?) for tuning various things and also running little utilities to improve disk and network performance... But, will they have the same skill with the registry? What about all the 3rd party tools to ease remote administration? I don't think you could reasonably expect to get away with running a windows server for a year w/o rebooting. In today's environment you *must* keep up with patching. This means having test servers available with the same hardware software config and testing updates on them, then pushing patches out live as soon as you can. You should plan on rebooting your windows servers once a month for no other reason than a security patch will require it. Yes, on a hardened and locked down IIS webserver and best practice physical security, you will be able to skip some months but I wouldn't count on a whole year. There is nothing nasty or stealthy about this, each update clearly states if it will need a reboot If this is an issue then throw 2 IIS servers behind a hardware load balancer. Use 2 servers using replicated DFS for file serving. There is clustering to address SQL or Exchange scenarios. There are ways to achieve high availability in most cases. I am unaware of a good solution for a high availability VPN concentrator on Windows. Networking is an area where Linux really has the upper hand. This may be about to change now that there is Server 2008 "core" install. The advantage of Linux here is that kernel and glibc related security patches are relatively rare and those are the only ones I can think of on that platform which would require a reboot. The design of the system and libraries is such that patches to a webserver like apache, or the php interpreter, or postgre sql, or almost anything else you can think of require only a restart of that service, an order of magnitude faster than rebooting the entire system. Still, it is application downtime and they are fools if they don't keep the *NIX system patched; there are many folks out there trying to