I would advocate against ORMs in general. Only make your code as complicated as it needs to be. ORMs tend to abstract a bit too much and there can be needless repition in code due to ORM limitations. IF you must use one, use a light weight one like Dapper.

Database has 147 tables and we have 145 triggers. It is a vendor independent change tracking mechanism that we developed so that we could make it portable.

I have worked with this for a little bit now and I think it will probably do everything you want at a reasonable price. http://www.ghielectronics.com/catalog/[^] The electronics work with the .NET Micro Framework which can be a little annoying to work with but it is very easy to get prototypes and projects up and running.

CrashPlan is a favorite for backups. Dropbox for file sync.

I really hate that "feature" as well. We have to put a test in every form_load event to check if it is in design mode. There should certainly be an option to turn off code execution in design mode.

We use a dedicated server at a hosting company and we are super happy with Sourcegear Fortress/Vault. Fortress adds ALM on top of Vault, the source control system. http://www.sourcegear.com[^] It works very well for us in 5 locations between the US and the UK. We use SSL to secure communication to and from the web server.

modified on Friday, January 16, 2009 9:28 AM

We have a team of 6 devs and we are using SourceGear Fortress. Fortress takes Vault and adds work item tracking and build server integration. One of our devs has used many other systems; Clear Case, CVS, Subversion, and TFS and he believes SourceGear is the best. I implemented SCM at our company and through my many evals, SourceGear had the easiest product to install, configure and manage. It was also the least expensive commercial option. We have had a couple of minor issues but support was very helpful. They provide a good SDK and API to write custom tools for builds and various management operations.

With the work I have been doing, ASP.NET/C#, 2008 seems to be a bit better than 2005. My gripe is with the rendering engne in the ASPX designer. I have a Theme and a StyleSheetTheme assigned to most of my pages and I get a stupid message about "This page contains invalid blah blah blah". However clicking on the refresh button makes the error go away until the next time I load the page. Couldn't VS just handle that better? I am going to be getting rid of the themes in my apps in favor of pure CSS but what a bother in the meantime.