There are a number of excellent component vendors e.g. DevExpress and Telerik who make WinForms apps look sensational.

Garry Lowther CEO and Founder TriSys Business Software Cambridge, England www.trisys.co.uk

Building software using pre-written, debugged, documented and supported components is the smartest thing we can do as developers. We absolutely should not re-invent the wheel. You can choose to be either a low-level component developer - this is a huge market. You would get to employ all your raw computer science learning and be as close to the machine as you can to derive maximum performance from your components. Or at the other end of the scale you could choose to be a high-level business systems developer, where re-assembling and integrating large components to build business software which fits the precise requirements of the corporation is the order of the day. All developer roles have their own unique challenges and I personally welcome having the wide choice of components, allowing me to focus on solving actual customer problems where business communication skills are of equal importance than coding ability. My advice would be find your preferred level. Low, mid, or high, or something in between? Change jobs if necessary. The software industry is going to be around for a long time and is incredibly varied. Read the 'Mythical Man Month'. Only 17% of any software project is coding. That statistic may help you find your ideal role.

Garry Lowther CEO and Founder TriSys Business Software Cambridge, England www.trisys.co.uk

Surely it's so simple - real men have android, girls have iphone ;-)

Garry Lowther CEO and Founder TriSys Business Software Cambridge, England www.trisys.co.uk

Timely post - I made this point in my codeproject article which highlighted that web developers have resorted to passing complex business data as strings because there is no industrial strength mechanism to do what more mature development platforms have. Data is really key to making line of business (LoB) web applications, but unfortunately the industry currently has the tail wagging the dog: we are trying to retro-fit robust business data services onto a scripted/markup platform. The two don't mix. We are forced to compromise, and this ain't good as we will find out with an enormous number of broken legacy web apps in the near future. The current methods of building cross-platform LoB web applications is simply not good enough.