I am from Austria and every time when we are in the States we got coffee issues. On our project sites we try to get the strongest roast possible, and it still is just like tea, tasting too bitter overall. But not much flavor. One day a colleague from Switzerland took his Espresso cooker with him, and along some real coffee. First problem was, with 110V AC it took ages to get it hot, but then this was really nice! However, our American co-workers nearly got a stroke from this strength :) BR Florian

I was raised with manual DB creation and then creating code that accesses the DB. This worked well with the waterfall model, where (theoretically) no changes would appear after planning and design (on paper) were over. But in recent years, as things became more "agile" (read: people do not want to make decisions, people want to change their mind very often, people just lack knowing the full story) I started to change my mind. We had lots of problems in our application when we were adding fields to an already existing complex DB and then implementing the handling code. Sometimes datatypes were wrong. Sometimes fieldnames were misspelled etc especially when the change was not implemented by just only one person. Another strong point for code-first entities design was the thing with SVN: While we had good practice already with versioning our code, the DB was hard to track in SVN. Ultimately people started to checkin binary backups from SQL Server, but you could not diff them etc. With code-first we now have a singular, unique description of the Db in Plaintext, with matching datatypes and compile-time error checks. Our test cycles are much easier now. BR Florian

anntony_wang wrote:

I like Windows 8 for it's beautiful design .

Really? Ok, likes and dislikes are highly personal. But honestly, this is the first time I really think they over-designed this part of software. By over-designing I think of letting look and feel decide or overrule technical details too much. The marriage between mobile and desktop ends in many many small compromises, which in the end sound like: We want do have it all! Why, MS, do you think you can do Desktop AND Mobile? These two things have so few things in common I think, that putting them "somehow" together ends up with a big confusion for all users. Even MS fanboys will have a hard time. I would have highly appreciated a software vendor deciding to support the desktop like it always did, and in parallel launching it´s Apple clone "Surface" with lets say "Windows 7 Mobile"... But it was not decided this way. Still I could somehow live with it. I could switch to Linux now. But.... WHY on earth the whole world starts to adopt metro design NOW? Webpages and lots of 3rd-party stuff looks really like Kindergarten design now. With all graphic & CPU power, we reduce icons to 2-color schemes, making all things boxy? Its an offense for my eyes and for the whole development of GUI & stuff to finally end up with this simplyfied, stupid looking designs. Thats what is my pure personal meaning. regards Florian

... and you loose control over all the data. I still cannot understand why so many companies want to store vital data outside of their server rooms just because they cannot hire the right boys to guard them. Every single file you are not able to control can compromise your business one day. Remember, there are dozens of organizations which could be interested in all that stuff. It is simply a bad habit to be too promiscous with all the information one can have in his life. But yes, as all people use gmail and google docs, nobody seems to care for that anymore. The fact that it worked until today is a good argument that it will work in the future, isn´t it? regards Florian

Hello, in my app framework we have different .NET services on either the same or different physical machines. The current .NET Remoting may or may not be switched to WCF one day. Regardless of that I did not find a statement on the web if it is possible to serialize a Linq request and get the reply back over the wire. Currently we are using handcrafted abstraction objects for the query part and return DataTables, Scalars etc... any ideas? thanks Florian

Timothy, as the others already stated, it is depending mostly on the vendor of the Db. For example, see this Oracle discussion (by now the ODP with Entity support should be out): https://forums.oracle.com/forums/thread.jspa?messageID=2325615[^] If you want to write your own, it could take some time though... I think is is a non-trivial task. For what Db´s are you looking for? See also the various 3rd-party alternatives in the discussion...

Well stay away if you can... We are developing customer software where actually the customer gets all source code and a license for further developing on the project. Now, if MS only sells VS2010 we have no good argument to keep 2008 around, and we also do not want to explain to the customer that at the end of our development, we will upgrade the project from 2008 to 2010, making it essentially un-editable on our side. So the simple but effective deprecation of old versions leaves us no choice, and it´s the same with Win XP vs. Win 7, Server 2003 vs 2008 etc. We have sub-suppliers who still cannot confirm that their software will run smoothly on Win 7 / Server 2008, forcing us to make manual downgrades which are costly and leave much of the available power (64bit, huge memory) unused. On the other Hand, Windows 7 seems to be a big leap forward. It´s attitude towards the user is much more optimistic and the useability has really improved. Stay away from Office 2007 & 2010 dough :)

-- "The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up." Mark Twain

Its even more weird with VBA now, where object variables have to be used with SET:

Dim something as Sheet
Set something = Sheets("blah")

The "compiler" will complain if the SET is omitted... LET... SET.. and then nothing. What evolution :D BTW my first and always mantra for VBA: put an OPTION EXPLICIT in front of every file! :)

Ian Shlasko wrote:

Ah, memories...

Same here... Coming from the technical school after having learned Pascal for 2 or 3 years, the university scared me by forcing us to use Modula-2. I passed only with good luck. Then, 2 or 3 years later they switched the course to Java. regards

Dear all, I have the task to wrap a list inside a .NET wrapper, and actually after some heavy researching and editing, it seems to work, but I dont trust that I have understood all unmanaged issues correctly. First, I found I should add an operator overload and a copy constructor to my class:

RawCoil::RawCoil(const Core::RawCoil& pParam)
{
*this = pParam;
}

RawCoil& RawCoil::operator=(const RawCoil &obj)
{
	this->Id = obj.Id;
	return \*this;
}

Is this correct? Then, there is the main list variable, which is used inside the unmanaged code. When is the memory allocated/freed, this I don´t understand:

	list coils; //where is this object instantiated? automagically? 

Another interesting questions. The List<> from .NET will arrive with new elements from time to time, and I have to synchronize it to the unamanged code:

int unmanageCoils(List^ managedCoils, list *unmanagedCoils)
{
unmanagedCoils->clear();
for(int i=0;iCount;i++)
{
Coil^ coil = managedCoils[i];
Core::RawCoil newCoil; //where is this object instantiated? automagically?
newCoil.Id = ManagedToSTL(coil->coilId); //string conversion
unmanagedCoils->push_back(newCoil);

	}
	return managedCoils->Count;

how is the memory allocation treated for the list elements? The thing is I want to prevent any leaking of memory, as I am normally only developing in C# and quite paranoid when I have to switch back to old times :) kind regards Florian