TLA - three letter acronym

I'm trying to understand this stuff: If I have a URL of 'www.mywidgets.com/smallwidgets', then smallwidgets is a subdirectory under the domain www.mywidgets.com. Is that correct? The 'smallwidgets' subdirectory is part of the www.mywidgets.com website. Is that correct? Can 'smallwidgets' be a separate website with it's own domain name and widget database and processing logic and etc? If I have a URL of 'www.mywidgets.smallwidgets.com', then smallwidgets is a subdomain of www.mywidgets.com. Is that correct? In this case, is smallwidgets a separate website? Can it be a separate web site with its own database/logic/etc if I have a domain name of www.smallwidgets.com and point it to www.mywidgets.smallwidgets.com? Do these questions make sense or am I still too confused to ask coherent questions? The reason I'm asking is I'm a hobby developer (C#, winforms) with a small business selling collectible stamps. I want a web presence (besides eBay), to expand the business and to expand my knowledge of web development. My budget is as close to zero cost as I can make it. I want (I think) at least two independent 'websites', say www.mystore.com for the public and www.mydevelopmentstore.com for just me, each with it's own SQL database. I'm having a terrible time figuring out what hosting I need to buy. It's obvious to me that if I buy two separate hosting plans I can do what I want, but I'm trying to figure out if I can get away with just one.

Last night I came to the conclusion that it could not be done. But it's always difficult to prove a negative, so thanks for the confirmation.

I've kind of programmed myself into a corner. I just changed my application to use David Hall's Task Scheduler Library for Net, so now the app requires elevated permissions (run as Administrator). However, I discovered that when I 'run as administrator' the app's connection to QuickBooks fails. Some research led me to find that the QuickBooks SDK will not work with elevated permissions on Windows 7. So now part of my app requires elevated permission and part of it requires non-elevated permission. I think I can get around this by splitting the task scheduler code off in a separate process like this example: "A new process with elevated privileges can be spawned from within a .NET application using the "runas" verb. An example using C#:"

System.Diagnostics.Process proc = new System.Diagnostics.Process();
proc.StartInfo.FileName = "C:\\Windows\\system32\\notepad.exe";
proc.StartInfo.Verb = "runas"; // Elevate the application
proc.Start();

So my question is, is this the only way? Are there other, better alternatives? Thanks.

Oh, that is beautiful. Well done. I haven't laughed that hard in quit a while.

He's using VS Express, plug-ins are not supported.

Ah ha! That makes a lot of sense. Thank you.

I'm a hobbyist learning slowly about C# & OOD & N-Tier. I was looking at a couple of how-tos on the web today. Both had the business layer talking to the data layer like this example-

public class BusinessLayer
{

    public int Method1(string firstName, string lastName)
    {
        DataLayer dataLayer = new DataLayer();
        return dataLayer.DoSomething(firstName, lastName);
    }

    public int Method2(int personID, string firstName, string lastName, int age)
    {
        DataLayer dataLayer = new DataLayer();
        return dataLayer.DoSomethingElse(personID, firstName, lastName, age);
    }

}

I would have coded it like this -

public class BusinessLayer
{
private DataLayer dataLayer = new DataLayer();

    public int Method1(string firstName, string lastName)
    {  
        return dataLayer.DoSomething(firstName, lastName);
    }

    public int Method2(int personID, string firstName, string lastName, int age)
    {
        return dataLayer.DoSomethingElse(personID, firstName, lastName, age);
    }

}

Assuming my way is wrong, why is their way correct? Is it an encapsulation principle that I don't understand correctly or something else? Thanks.

You can only check bidder ids/emails for your own listings. There is no way the APIs are going to let you get to that info for somebody else's items. The eBay developers program http://developer.ebay.com/[^] has lots of examples to get you going.

Thanks - that is a better way to ask the question - what do you folks use at home for source control?

I'm a hobby programmer, although I do some coding to help run my business. I'm the only programmer, using Visual Studio 2008. I need (I think) to start using some sort of source/version control for my projects. There are multiple open source/free/low cost solutions available, what is the best (read easiest) for single developer use? I'd appreciate some suggestions/hints/guidance. Thanks.