Reading is theory, experience is practice In my opinion reading gives you a base knowledge that somehow is consistent on the specific issue. But in practice it always is a little different. Normally you take the good things from a book and adapt it to the real world. What is never told in the technical books is the view on money, and that's what it's finally all about, at least in business. from sunny snowy switzerland Dani

I agree with most of the previous writers. If you tend do go into embedded programming where you have restrictions on memory/performance it might be a good idea to jump on the C++ train. On the other side, from my experience, I would rather invest in learning more on C# and software design issues. For client applications the suggestion for WPF/XAML is a good idea too. I think these two technologies definitely have a future. Hope I helped a little bit and good luck at your new job from switzerland Dani

Hi, I just bought a Nikon D200 (well it's not so cheap) but I can definitely recommend this camera. It's fast, reliable and well organized. But to decide on which camera to buy, mostly when looking for a SLR the lens are the main factor. Alot of people say the body of an SLR doesn't count so much. If you have bad lens a good body is obsolete. If you have lenses from an analog camera I would stick to the brand you had before. So if you have Canon lens, take a Canon body, otherwise you have to buy the lenses all again. If you have no lenses then my opinion is, it doesn't make a big difference if you choose Canon or Nikon. Just take what suites you. There was a Sony SLR released not long ago. It might be an option to the main players Canon and Nikon. For very good details about all sorts of cameras I prefer the site: http://www.dpreview.com Have fun Daniel :-)

Hi there, For a big SW project we did a long evaluation (2 years ago) and came up with: UI Suite: Infragistics (still one of the best) Charting: C1 (best performance for large data amounts) Reporting: List & Labels (not yet used but evaluated. Has some features we need that Crystal Reports doesn't have) Happy coding Daniel :-)

Hi Super Lloyd, In deed, if you handle communication carefully and maybe meet once more than needed, I'm sure it works. Of course it also depends on the other team members. If they can get used to this 'communication change' that would be best. Anyway, it takes time. Cheers Daniel :-)

I need about 15min oneway from door to door with car. It's about 15 kilometers (10 miles). Working from home has been tested by our company. It has advantages but you have to have good discipline to work and not to mix with private matters. The mix would slow down your work. Communication is a big problem if you have to work with a team. Even if you have video conferencing, email, phone etc. still the direct talk eye in eye is the most effective. I think you have to get used to it and always keep an eye on improving information exchange. If everybody in the team participates it can work really fine. Cheers from switzerland Daniel :-)

Hi there, we use TestTrackPro from Seapine. It's a bug tracking tool but also works for work coordination. You can assign, comment, estimate. We boosted project performance quite a way. Regards from Liechtenstein

Hi Frog, In German we would say 'Willkommen bei CP' or in the country I come from (Switzerland) this would be in one of the dialects 'Willkommä bi CP'. Regards Daniel

Hi there, We have an application that accesses OPC Servers on an ethernet network. OPC (Ole for process control) uses DCOM to transmit information. To get a connection through DCOM we need to change certain security settings with the DCOMCNFG tool. Because this is very error prone for customers, I need a way to do this programmatically during setup. Does anybody have code snippets of how to change these settings or does anybody know which methods to call to do so? I prefer examples in C# or C++ but if you have any information it would help me anyway. Best regards Daniel