Maybe you should use MSMQ for the huge file copy operation. How huge is the file though? I've used VS 2010 since the day it was available on MSDN, and never had a serious problem. It is definitely more stable than VS 2008. I still use 2008 sometimes for my older projects which I haven't yet migrated to 2010, and I miss VS2010 every minute.

This is a very common situation today. Many kids who have grown up on asp.net, don't even know that a button click event actually posts back depending on action and method attributes of form. These were the basics we knew from programming with asp and jsp. Similarly with vba, programmers should'nt just hate vba for the sake of it. Though those who have worked with vb and are expert excel (or word, access, etc) users would find vba easier. Programming vba is more about understanding how the business uses excel and knowing how to access cell ranges, charts etc. and manipulating them. The syntax is anyway very simple. I would have lost a large client if I wasn't good at vba. In this particular case, every morning, they wanted to email the company health dashboard to the top 10 guys in the company. It was done manually, but any changes to the dashboard would mean no daily mails till the excel dashboard was changed. This is where I stepped in and provided an automatic solution in vba within 5 days. If I had to create a c# application, it would have to go through their standard software project process which would take a minimum of 2 weeks. Once I get the Purchase Order, I would then begin programming it, taking another 2 weeks including deployment. This was 2 years back, and today they are my biggest clients. The dashboard is still running strong. So yeah I love VBA :)

Could'nt stop laughing. Still am. :D

Ten years back, I had written my own windowing system using C helped by a great book by Al Stevens. Later I ported the whole framework to c++. This framework I built from scratch, contained about 5% assembly and the rest C/C++. This was during my college days and it was one of the most fun things I have done. I used this framework all through my college life and then in a project at my 2nd job too. However today the IT world is vastly different. My customers want applications with 75 windows and 1000s of windowing components like buttons (simple) and calendars (complex). And I don't want to sit with my framework I wrote 10 years back and add up new components as the need arises. Even if I claim to be the best programmer in this world, I cannot maintain a quality component better than what the creators of Java or now .NET do. Not to mention the upgrades and loads of free and paid components I can buy off the shelf. .NET in short is an enterprise development environment. Another reason for its popularity is the best of its kind coding platform like Visual Studio (2010), which makes like so much more easier. If I want to create an accounting package or a POS system with a serial interface today, I can get started in a few quick steps. Looking low level, .NET lets a team of (say) 100 developers work on a single code base, without worrying if programmer Mr. John ComeLately has forgotten to "delete" a pointer, causing the entire application to fail. From experience I can say, that the program will work perfectly fine till you have that big demo with the customer, and then it crashes spectacularly with a run-tme pointer exception :). At a higer level, .NET lets me learn a few tools quickly and get productive in the shortest possible time. It lets companies quickly replace programmers who move on to bigger and better things, without letting the project suffer. These are some of the reasons why systems like Java and .NET are so popular in my opinion.