ahh! You're reading a smart card. That explains it. Were you reading it through a serial port? FYI I found an interesting project on reading smart cards with C#: A Smart Card Framework for .NET[^]

I see the others have you given you plenty to read regarding the parsing of parameters, so I will just add that it would be best to do ONLY the parsing of parameters and possibly writing of the help text in the Console application and put all actual program logic in a dll. That way you can plug any interface you want into your app: console window, windows UI, WPF, Web Service or whatever.

That is so true. The intermediate in any craft is out to proove himself and so shows off everything he knows whether it was the best solution for the problem or not. Were as the master shows simplicity and economy, doing more with less. I found this[^] article on the same topic interesting.