B/c there's no escaping jQuery and its excellent client-side unobtrusive validation, you may as well go ahead and bite the bullet and go full-out jQueryUI (which appears to have consistent and well-thought-out styling). My perspective on MVC3 is that it's best to avoid its ASP.NET underpinnings unless absolutely necessary and using ASP.NET custom controls is nas-ty by all accounts. Regardless, in the web app world, we can run but Javascript will track us down and make us do its bidding but I'm not going back to that miserable, back-stabbing, sloppy-a$$ terd ASP.NET. No way, Jose! That said, I'm not real happy with Razor, either. I mean, MS already had C#, T4 and J(ava)script (already used for their VS project and item template code), but I guess the syntax wasn't fsckd-up enough and the VS Editor didn't choke on them enough. Sheez. :-) Robert W. McCall execNext.com DONE := "Lasting peace & happiness for *ALL* human beings."

IMO, a) WinForms give you very precise control over the control-flow if you need it and are willing to spend the time setting it up meticulously. As well, forcing users to install an exe is a measure of security as web-based internet connectivity is necessarily ubiquitous and therefore very difficult to police. b) Browser discrepancies require severely vomitous hackage to overcome the various quirks. Again, security crops up where the power of JavaScript and the DOM combine with the lack of any kind security-oriented browser design planning to make cross-session hijacking preventable only by running each session in a completely different browser -- but that's probably surmountable. c) Performance is naturally way better if any kind of client-side processing is needed and it comes pretty easy via C# or even VB. If you want browser app client-side performance, you have to be a js master or be rocking a gnarlyflop box. And, don't tell anyone, but browser apps will disappear once the dev tools facilitate generating sophisticated patterned software systems (eg: client-server apps with a GUI front-end) -- all the talkytalky is just boilerplate interface mapping and the worst place to do that is in a browser. Why not have a sleek OS-native interface do the UI, where the flow is precise, lightning fast and the net requests can have patterned response semantics? It's the failure of current tooling that makes web apps look like such a good idea -- if you check out MS Lightswitch you will see a hint of what dev sw will facilitate in Web 3.0. I'm not saying WinForms is the ideal here, but it's better than web apps and my dive into WPF left me with the impression of a huge tower of potential whose details are too enormous to define exactly and, thus, implement sensibly. Lots of good ideas in WPF, but having less control doesn't make for reliable/predictable apps. Peace & Blessings, bmac "Lasting peace & happiness for ALL human beings!"

XP x64 SP2 with Classic appearance * custom theme that is all Tahoma 8 with Title Bars at 16px high to put taskbar icons at tiny size (just above infinitesimal) to maximize the number of taskbar buttons that can fit on its vert, LHS placement (with the excellent 'taskbar shuffle' for reordering). Consolas 9 for UltraEdit & occasional VS.NET. ClearType, nofx and no sounds whatsoever. Rig is q6600, 8GB, 2x RAID0 500GB 7200 (only 15% full) + 1.5 GB Media & old-schoo SyncMaster 213T that is just gorgeous (if only I had 5 more) run off a nice cheap Radeon 1550. All run on a Micro ATX Intel JO mobo -- no snickering! Willing to move to Server 08 on/as HyperV + tons of XP x86 baseline VMs w/ diff combos of SQL Server, Oracle, VS.NET -- base XP image update workflows will be a beotch, tho, so I'm content for now. Well, as content as I can be without 4 or 5 128GB SSDs in RAID5 w/ a dedicated RAID card running under a pair of 3GHz i7 hexacore chips at full-on 6.4 QPI pipe. But that's only temporary until the main volume is a RAID0 bank of ACard 48GB RAM drives. Then I might be able to parse, process, crossref and regenerate the freakin Microsoft SDK docs for the FCL/BCL and lang specs -- to my visual preferences with each class and member list on the same dam page with individual page settings for which sections are closed and open and presented in inheritance order with no 1.5" bs header. Then, maybe I can get some work done. Was that more than you wanted? Sorry, nerd hyperjealousy overtook me after seeing Super Lloyd boast his prowess in running Windows for Workgroups. Nerd love to all.

I'm beginning to think that the only reason you run WfW is to brag about it here :-) C'mon, what about the platter? 5Meg? 20" diameter? Is your monitor maybe a 50x30 bastard child of a lite-bright and an electronic battleship? Seriously, living off residuals must be nice-nice. What software do you run on that thang, anyway? Peace, y'all :-) bmac

Could be worse -- you could be dealing with HR :-) I think we need to find/invent a term for the level beyond 'pure evil'. True, 'corporate America' would suffice but it would confuse the normtards (those who think they're normal which makes their utter retardedness so much more destructive and unbearable). And in case someone in this thread didn't already understand, the only qualification for a management position is to have proven you ability to fill in for upper management and/or Satan himself with its concomitant enjoyment of making sure that the rules are followed. I'd find Dilbert a helluva lot funnier if it wasn't so spot-on. FtMFs. Sorry to hijack your thread to rant but it's better than every other thought that comes to mind. Peace be with you and good luck!

Personally, the best thing I've come across in a long time has been F# -- after over 20 years of professional programming, it's the first thing I've explored that changed how I think about programming. Plus it has a REPL built-in that not only makes testing .NET features super-fast, it removes the need to create a UI for the little helper tools we need to write from time-to-time -- just paste the function defs in and use them, which is extra good for data massaging. That $9 BILLION MS (I saw that figure years ago) has been spending on R&D has paid off at least once. Not coincidentally, the F# guys are the same guys that designed and impld the .NET 2.0 Generics, which is truly impressive, IHO. Peace be with us all.

the word Webinar drives me nuts, regardless of whether it's in print or out loud. I don't know why, really, but I'm not going to lie about it :-) Peace & Blessings to us all, bmac