Dunno if this is the best place to post this but don't suppose anyone's ever found a way into the recovery console from the Windows 7 32-bit DVD when the 64-bit version of Windows 7 is installed without it complaining you have a 64-bit version and throwing you out? :sigh: I have both DVDs but need to run a recovery tool for which there isn't a 64-bit version. The 64-bit recovery console seems to be missing the wow stuff needed to run 32-bit apps and I can't run it from any other bootable environment I've tried such as BartPE because they're based on XP and don't fully support symbolic links.

It depends on what you're trying to do, the two things are different. If you're certain e is a SomeObject then I'd cast it. If it may or may not be I'd usually use the as keyword, in which case obj would be null if it isn't a SomeObject as opposed to throwing an exception.

At least it's more convincing than the type of crap I usually receive. I've been getting the below on several email addresses nearly every day for months... I'm *some random name*, how are u doing today i saw your profile today at *some random website* and became interested and I would like to know more about you ok. If you can answer me back on my e-mail *some random yahoo address* I will send you my pictures and tell you more about me. I hope we can move from here, I'll be waiting for your e-mail me e-mail above. Sincerely, *name* In some cases those random bits are just field names like [NAME] the their mail merge hasn't even worked.

I have a tshirt that says "I'm not totally useless, I can be used as a bad example" that I've considered wearing on occasion

We had SharePoint at the last place we worked at. I never worked with it personally, but it only ever seemed to be up for about 3 days at a time before going down for whatever reason and causing the infrastructure guys another week of headaches trying to sort out. It always struck me as being way too huge and bloaty for the purposes it was meant to fulfill. The dependency on it is one of the (but not the only) things that puts me off TFS. I've not worked with ASP.NET MVC if that's what you mean enough to have a strong opinion of it. I've occasionally had to get into such a project, make a quick change and get out and it's seemed more difficult than for more traditional projects but I've just put that down to my inexperience with that and other frameworks used in the solution (the one I'm thinking of also used entity framework, autofac, razor, jquery and a whole heap of other stuff I was unfamiliar with, plus I'm more of a winforms guy). However one thing that puts me off learning a lot of the new frameworks MS come out with is they don't have a very long lifespan before being replaced by something else. My feeling is entity framework will be around for a while but I'm hesitant to learn WPF, Silverlight and others as a lot of these things seem to only have a lifespan of a year or less before everyone starts saying they're dead and you should be using something else for new projects. If people actually did that each time then they'd end up with every one of their projects utilizing whatever framework was popular that month and that strikes me as being a maintenance nightmare and would make code re-use more difficult.

Amazed Civ 1 still works, I was pleased when I found Civ 3 worked in Win 7 :) But yeah regarding older apps, at work I'm maintaining VB6 and FoxPro 5 apps in Win 7 64-bit. I'm also pretty sure some of the stuff we maintain uses components which are only available in 16-bit (not sure maintaining them is possible on a 64-bit OS though, I think others have used virtual machines when necessary for that). At home the oldest stuff I'm running natively are various apps from about the year 2000 I think, though I have older games that will only run on a virtual machine running Windows 98 or DosBox and a few that I can't get to work at all. And no I don't fancy the idea of most of the stuff I can typically have running - things like multiple RDP sessions, various guest virtual machines, excel, visual studio, a minimized directx game to restore and play when i'm sat waiting for something else, etc being in javascript/html. It seems, like, way to reverse the last 25 years of advancements in computing power.

Think (and hope) it's all gonna be toned down somewhat. They had better not drop support for current apps written in Win32/MFC/.NET/whatever or I won't be "upgrading" for a very long time. I seem to remember reading horror stories before XP came out though saying that it isn't going to run anything that isn't signed by MS and that kinda thing, relating to TPM chips and DEP that kind of thing but it was just reporting blown out of proportion.

hmm interesting, I wasn't aware it scanned your pictures to generate friend suggestions. In fact I thought I read somewhere that the technology is only used to search pictures of people already on your friends list for automatic tagging. Can kinda see why some people are up in arms about it now.

Looks useful. Work's license is 2010 Premium though and I'm guessing it requires Ultimate. I don't have 2010 at home yet.

Nagy Vilmos wrote:

In about 3 1/2 seconds it will be available on a torrent to download.

Exactly, all I bet this will do is lead to more people watching it than otherwise would, just to see what all the fuss is about.

Seen the first one and wasn't anything special really, just somewhat overhyped and pretty dull. Haven't seen the 2nd.

I comment my code loads, and usually put lots of info into any bugtracking system things are raised in. I don't do much in the way of big documents and diagrams and things usually though in most cases, but it depends on the situation. My pet peeve is auto-generated documentation using things like ghostdoc though, which just adds comments that tell you the blatantly obvious from the method name. Does something with a thingy. public void DoSomething(object thingy) That kind of thing adds no value in my view and neither does an empty summary block.

Only know the basics. I try to steer away from web development, though increasingly seem to be forced onto it. I suppose it helps to have a more varied skill set etc though, but I generally find web development a nightmare compared to development for windows (regardless whether the windows dev is WinForms, MFC, WPF, direct Win32 API, etc). Having to deal with things like different web browsers and trying to figure out how to debug ajax stuff irritates me, though I guess part of it comes down to what you're used to and I've a lot more experience in the windows world.

Doesn't seem that much. If I get a taxi home from town (about 8 miles) it's usually about £35 ($50 maybe? not sure what the exchange rate is atm)

I have it disabled. I think the reason for disabling it was I was sick of seeing long addresses when pinging machines on the LAN whereas I can generally remember the IPv4 addresses. Is there any need to use it on a LAN anyway? I only need about 20 addresses in my home and most of those are virtual machines. Does the protocol need to be enabled on the client in order to access a website that only has a v6 address? I'm guessing it would though guessing the router would also need a v6 address and none of my 2 in-use routers or various spare routers seem to support it. I think the whole thing is overhyped anyway - the argument I always see is about mobile phones and increasing numbers of devices in the home needing an address. But devices in the home generally all share a single external IP via NAT anyway, and mobile phones only need one while doing something internet-related, or do the newer ones tend to maintain a permanent always-on connection?

I don't see why not. Surely the base is just the way that the number is written down and doesn't change any of the calculations etc?

Eww Stupid yellow animation thing that makes it look like you're playing games in work when u first visit it. Couldn't see the entire width of the text as it doesn't wrap properly. Just a vertical strip down the left side with incomplete text "Artefact is an" then it stops. Next column says "Longer term, we hope to use this deliver high-end 3D experiences to all" then it stops, unless I resize my web browser to see it all. No indication of how to scroll vertically. Vertical scrollbar is eventually revealed by resizing window horizontally. Even then it took me some time to notice the yellow box was a scrollbar. Scrolling with the mouse wheel causes a video of what I assume to be an ipad to be flashed on and off repeatedly. Just eww.

I still see XP as 2000 with the bugs added :p Actually XP wasn't too bad. The remote desktop feature was useful, the server side of which wasn't in 2000 Pro. That's about it though, 2000 is still what I'd consider the most solid / stable version I've ever used.

I can agree with this. Win 98 to me just seemed like 95 with loads of extra unnecessary bloat bolted on like Active Desktop (which really slowed computers down at the time), the "Channels" thing and the channel bar which no one ever used, various other bloaty bits here and there to slow it down, etc. The only reason I eventually moved to it was due to drivers for USB devices requiring Win 98, despite the fact that the Win 95 version I had specifically said on the CD "With USB support". I never had 98SE though so dunno if things improved in that version and by how much. There were at least 2 versions of 95, if not more. The first one I had was an upgrade from 3.1 but not sure even that was the first version as it had titlebar animations on the minimize/restore unlike the animated boxes another version I saw had (unless that was a beta). Then I got a new computer which included 95 OSR2 which also had the OpenGL screensavers and other bits.

I'm interested, but seeing as it wouldn't really benefit my current job (which tends to be dealing with users asking questions, deploying things and going to meetings 95% of the time and very little coding or design, plus I keep hearing murmurings that mean I might soon be forced to work with sharepoint), I never end up going into the low-level side that much. Shame really as it's the inner workings that interest me more. In these days of 8-core CPUs of which the busiest core is typically never more than 2% busy under normal use, I'd guess there aren't many situations that call for that kind of thing anymore though.