bwahahahaha!!!! and 72% of all statistics are made up on the spot.

One of the best books ever (was part of my degree course material) is "The Design of Everyday Things" (Sorry, can't remember off-hand the author/publisher) It doesn't focus on development at all; rather, it's a look at design principles for all things used and seen by humans, from doors, to light-switches, to cars, to computer error messages etc. etc. Very entertaining.... :)

I do a fair amount of interviewing in our company. We are a small company, and not exactly bleeding edge. We tend to hire more junior developers, and then try skill them up in our methodologies. This is mind, my criteria is usually more personal in nature, and more generic rather than technology specific: can we get on well with them in a small, team environment? Are they willing and keen to learn and expand? Do they understand concepts of design? Are they aware of new technologies and industry news? Can they take instructions when given, even if they conflict with what they think is best? Are they confident enough to question, in that situation? Do they have the passion (don't think the word is too strong at all :) ) and do they look convinced that they are doing what they love? Will they work long hours happily? One of m y favourites: Do they focus on and enjoy the process of solving problems, or the achievement and result of a finished system? (Both answers are acceptible to me, it just determines what role to put them in) Personally, a degree doesn't add a massive amount of weight to an interviewee's case. A "certification" adds absolutely nothing most of the time. My 2c. :) -- modified at 1:45 Thursday 20th July, 2006

aaaarghh!! Infragistics!! Yes!! *seethe* > Huge. > Numerous patches and updates: MINOR version changes BREAK COMPATIBILITY? er...wtf? > Significant (and proven) performance degradation, just by having and instantiating a control on a form. > Doesn't follow IT'S OWN standards (erratic naming and methodology) > Customer-support personell adopt the "you're doing something wrong" approach to most queries. (Which, granted, may be true some of the time... but come on!) /rant That said, their controls look great! Personally, this is why I get pretty nervous using 3rd party stuff. However, I have used numerous smaller 3rd party stuff (like, single-controls, not suites) pretty successfully.

We were using VS2003 for some time, and moved to VS2005 as soon as it was available to us. Yes, there speed of the IDE was frustrating, but overall our productivity has increased. VS2005 and .Net2 are VASTLY better than their earlier versions. (Hope I'm not off topic here, because my experience is limited here to C#, ASP and a bit of VB) :)

:laugh::laugh:

ok, not to poke the coals here, but whats c++ going to do for you that you can't achieve in C#? Honestly, 90% of what you "can't do in C# that you can do in C++" is either because you shouldn't need to anymore, or you don't understand C# fully, or you're scared of losing the "control" you had in a more primitive language. Also, just to clarify, are you basically saying that C# and VB6 are essentially the same (in "usefulness"), or is that statement limited to UI development? I'm interested in this, as I have a constant battle with older developers (sorry, "programmers") who hate anything new-fangled, anything reusable/pre-written/generated, anything where they think they are losing control, anything where they don't have to write their own frikkin machine code everytime they want to populate a textbox! -- modified at 2:55 Wednesday 14th June, 2006