Professional .NET 2.0 Generics (Wrox) Pro WF (Apress) - now has a .NET 3.5 edition, I own the 3.0 edition - very well written and was recently mentioned on MSDN. Learning WCF (O'Reilly) - I don't own this book but I'm working through chapter 1 which is available online. Plus it was recommended by a colleague and has had near-universal good reviews. Her boss's book, Programming WCF Services, is more comprehensive but poorly written IMO. Main difference is that Michelle explains what she's doing, Juval Lowy just lists the features interspersed with his own enhanced classes and explains almost nothing. Both Learning WCF and Pro WF suit your criterion of Carl Lambrecht wrote: I definitely learn by doing, so I look for textbooks that do give step-by-step examples Another good thing about Pro WF is that the examples generally work out of the box. BTW, Learning WCF is based on .NET 3. However, Michelle has also provided the code for VS 2008/.NET 3.5. Kevin

David, Thanks for the response. I don't have a profiler on both platforms, but do on a development XP system. I had some time the other day, and tried to get some decent info out. Unfortunately, I'll need to find more time to put to it, my quick attempt at profiling did not yield much useful information. But thank you for pointing me in that direction. I don't think I'd ever used the profiling tools provided with VStudio, though I have used things like BoundsChecker and RedGate ANTS Profiler, so I get the general concepts. Thanks again for the suggestion. If you know any parituclarly good tutorials on using PREP and PROFILE, I'd appreciate it. Otherwise, I'll research and see what I can find... Cheers, Carl

Russ, Thanks for the response... Yeah, as I was writing my original post, I was starting to consider that rather than having the systray app be capable of driving the service, I should just hav ethe two operate independently, but reference the same core library which does the work. And the important addition is that the core library needs to persist its state in a local database. I'm trying to keep the client pieces very light however, so hopefully I can construct a reasonable XML file that can maintain all local information... Thanks again... Cheers, Carl

First of all, thanks to everyone that replied to my request. After a lot of deliberation (I'm a terrible shopper), I bought an iRiver 256MB player, the iFP890. I was very tempted by Chris Maunder's recommendation of the MPIO, I hadn't looked at them before. In the end, I selected the iFP890 because of the whopping advertised 40 hour battery life and slickness of packaging. When I downloaded the manual for the FY200 from the MPIO site, it seemed to have tons of PDF errors in it. Feature-wise, the iRiver and MPIO players seemed very similar. More storage would have been nice, but the models that provide for gigs of space were bigger than I was looking for. And it would have meant yet another expense for the models that take cards. I've got a couple different cards for my digital camera, in reality I only ever use one. Anyway, thanks again everyone, and now I've got some music to go listen to...:cool: Cheers, Carl

Start here: MFC ActiveX Controls for C++ MFC ActiveX. ATL is another route to do ActiveX. Samples: MFC Controls Samples. Ian Mariano - http://www.ian-space.com/ "We are all wave equations in the information matrix of the universe" - me

Richard Jones wrote: "It looks like you're writing a letter.." - Clippy "It looks like I didn't install the Office Assistant!" ;P -- Ian Darling "The moral of the story is that with a contrived example, you can prove anything." - Joel Spolsky