On the bright side, some former Watcom employees have left Waterloo and headed off to Redmond :-) "Some times the waves get so high you can hardly eat your dinner" - Captain Highliner

The company I work for went down the road of Borland's Builder because someone was able to design a simple application "In half the time it took to do it in Visual C++". I think one of the real tests for C# is whether it can scale as well as a C++ application. "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

I don't know about the UK, but in NA if you find the right cubicle job you'll be able to work from home. As much as freelance work is appealing, it does come with its drawbacks i.e. no benefits, no paid holidays, no paid statutory holidays, little income security etc. These are choices you have to make. In the freelance world, cash flow is critical. There can be times when you will go 2-3 months between pay cheques. Get a line of credit. I would start by spreading the word amongst everyone you know, and be flexible in what sort of work you're willing to do up front. Depending upon the situation where you work, even approach your soon to be former employer about contract work. Getting steady, prompt paying part-time work can make things a lot easier for a freelancer.

>I for one have never hear of a gun holding up a liquor store. >There is usually some moron behind the gun. If you live in the United States, doesn't it disturb you that there are so many gun related deaths? Regardless of your views of gun control, I would be bothered by the fact that either a) Guns kill people and there's far too many deaths because of a lack of gun control. or b) Morons kill people and I'm surrounded by a lot more gun-wielding morons than I would be if I lived somewhere else. Note there is no reference to beer or lighthouses anywhere in this post

They even stole the globe logo! :) "There's a fine line between clever and stupid" - David St. Hubbins

It shows that you have an interest in coding beyond it just being a job. This can be very important to a lot of good employers. Getting it to a finished state is important because in the job world everything has to get finished. Even if you're still working on it, that can be "the next stage". It also shows that you are capable of doing more than business applications, which opens up more interesting jobs. An employer may not be interested in gaming, but they may be looking for someone with graphics experience i.e. a GIS application. They may also need a coder right now, and someone with your experience 6 months down the road. As Tim says, describe what you're doing in more detail, especially if it is your own personal project. "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

Can you represent the numbers in hex? ;P

As do the owners of the slashdot site. The companies who work on the GCC compiler are generally CPU manufacturers who need a compiler for their chip so that people can write software for that chip. I don't think they develop it for the common good of mankind. "A person should aspire to live an upright life openly with pride, and this means saying ``No'' to proprietary software." - Richard Stallman

I have been using it for the last few months, here and there in various small COM objects. I had to port an MFC Application to an ATL COM Object and the controls classes saved me loads of time for porting dialogs. If you are an MFC developer using ATL I highly recommend them. My company's first shrink wrapped full application using WTL will likely be out the door in a couple of weeks. It seems to be working fine. Should I find anything in the WTL that doesn't work, I'll likely just go to the Win32 API to get the job done. "There's a fine line between clever and stupid" - David St. Hubbins

I see one potential problem with that line: "this" is a C++ keyword. Could that be the problem? What happens if you comment that line? "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

We use DevTrack at work. It works well for us, though I don't think it integrates with Visual C++, though I've never tried. Its quite quick, too. It is really easy to learn, but I don't administrate it, so I can't assess that side of it. "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

I haven't had any work in the last couple of months but 2 of my industrial customers use it in embedded PC applications. The devices are networked thanks to WATTCP. "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

"Rapid Development" by Steve MacConnell would be my recommendation, especially the "Best Practices" section. The case studies are also quite good as I've seen nearly all of the things mentioned in the studies happen at work. As already mentioned, "Debugging the Development Process" is also good. Another good book for projects is the "Antipatterns..." book. In my experience I have never seen a project fail because of the technology choices. ( I stay away from borland tools :-) ) Things may be late and have a reduced set of features, but never an absolute throwaway failure. It has always been bad project management. I think this is because the technology either does what you need or it doesn't, and there is much less middle ground. "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

You want your comments to state the intention of the code rather than what it says. i.e. A useless comment: i++; // increment i A useful comment: i++; // move to the next record in the SchoolBus table If you always describe what's supposed to happen rather than the code itself, you'll find that the comments will not get outdated so fast. The only exceptions to this rule that I follow is to should comment any areas that use language trickery, math, or places where I have hard coded "magic numbers". Dropping through cases in a switch() statement is a good example of language trickery. Font.Position -= charglyph.aWidth; // Why am I doing this? Font.Position += 1; // magic number - Why are we adding 1? // I won't remember what the 1 is for in a week from now. just my 2c "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

Curling: The only sport that you can hold a beer and a cigarette in your hand and yell at people to sweep and hurry. :) "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

I did some simple reporting with ActiveReports from a VB app, and it worked out quite well for me. It took me the usual day or 2 to get it to do what I wanted. I found Crystal and others to have the mentality of "Write your query to the database then...", as if all the data in the entire computing world is in some sort of SQL database. ActiveReports seemed to have more of a programming mentality to it. I don't know how well it works from C++. "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

The company I work for uses COM because when we start developing a component / class, we really don't know how or when or where we are going to reuse it. With everybody creating COM objects, it has increased the design standards of our objects because you don't know where or how they are going to be used. The ability to put more than one interface into a COM object and inherit the interface allows for code reuse that doesn't break old code. The separation of the interface from the code is also good design (some design pattern applies here ... and it has a name...). As to excluding MFC, we use the WTL header file atlctrl.h that puts an MFC wrapper around dialog controls used in an ATL project and STL rather than the MFC list classes. If there is a time saving MFC class beyond these, then we don't hesitate to use it. We try to avoid using it, but there are times when it helps ( something like CSocket comes to mind ). "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

I used to do Robotics stuff at work. 1. I used CE for one product and had to do some kernel rebuilding to get it to work. Once it worked it was quite nice. For a PC-based embedded project I personally like DOS. You write your own Interrupt Service Routines and you have direct access to the hardware. None of that kernel mode device driver stuff to wade through. It is also possible to make a bootable floppy disk start your program directly (i.e. no O/S). 2. If you're just starting out and want to get a kit, I'd look at items like the Basic Stamp or the Rabbit 2000 boards or something like either of these. These are kits rather than just processors, so it will save you a lot of grief and save a lot of soldering, too. There are also some fairly reasonably priced robot kits available. I don't know if their any good or not... 3. www.circuitcellar.com contains a lot of information on robotics. Circuit Cellar magazine is also quite good and has a lot of ads for these kits. "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

Take a look at GetThreadTime() and GetProcessTime() API calls ( they are NT-only). "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper

You should be able to get system information with (I think...) GetSystemInfo(...). There are also calls to get resource information etc. There was an article I read somewhere about someone using Windows 98 in a 24x7 configuration. If only I knew where I read it. It is going to take a fair number of 24 hour days to make sure that the system is stable to last a few 24 hour days. The author of the article went through about 4 different hardware combinations before he managed to get stable drivers for his system. I did a project in the past with Windows 98 and it would last about a week before needing to be restarted. Fortunately it just hung and the UI froze so our customers would simply restart their PC when it happened. "Harland Pepper, would you stop naming nuts" - Harland Pepper