Sloppy code; which to me is any code with bad formatting, no documentation ("my code is self-documenting" == garbage is to be left alone, not documented) and one-letter variable names (how are you saving typing time when autocomplete exists), this type of code has parallels with other services: the contractor who builds a house with crooked studs, uneven walls and leaking water lines or a mechanic who installs used parts as "new" and then leaves engine stains all over the interior of the car. In each case, the work was performed by a hack with no pride in the craft; someone who should be run out of the industry. With development specifically, I assume such code to have been written by "drag-and-drop" experts who complain that "coding is hard" and celebrate any framework that keeps them from being forced to learn how to code at a lower-level (MEANING: loves to drag-and-drop DB connection controls but could not write simple ADO.Net access code). Short answer: get out of the industry or join a bro-grammer collective to hide in.

Since the advent of higher-level languages as COBOL and BASIC, there has existed a populace which cries Programming will be dead soon! Secretaries will simply drag and drop objects to create an application.. Almost three decades have passed and coding is now more complex than numbered lines with goto or jump - the complexities of GDI+, generics and object relations have not achieved simplicity over PIX and pointers. Wherein is the simplicity of coding ASP.Net so that (well-designed) markup renders properly in IE, Firefox, Mozilla, Safari and Opera? Coding is an art for me as I design and render my interfaces in Photoshop or Lightwave. Coding is a science for me as I write and test my own search algorithms for repeatable results; notwithstanding a plethora of pre-written algorithms might exist. My goal is to create or to improve, not to mindlessly hook together pre-written objects because the herd baaaa-baaaas that reuse is good and don't recreate the wheel - baaaaaa-baaaad!. Coding is engineering for me as I draw the blueprint and storyboards for my creation, an architecture of algorithms to which I may claim authorship, a user-interface I designed and entities I wrote. If others dislike this profession so much for its complexity and equally despise coders for their individualist, heads-down and solitary practises, please leave quickly and let that door hit you on the way out. Nicholas

Without the various clarions of Micro$soft suxx, which unimpresses many as better suited for the open-source utopians sequestered at slashdot, the advice would be to install VS 2005. The ambition of many; perhaps not all, coders is to progress; a regression to VS 2003 is not in that path. The only appropriate concern for any company is a loss in revenue and Microsoft certainly understands this. The issues with VS 2005 will be fixed; if not, the market will migrate to another IDE and language.

I am searching for some inspiration, just for fun, for extracting the Delta (changes) among two files and saving this in a fashion similar to Visual Source Safe in which the history might be viewed and recreated. Anyone ever seen Java or C# code concerning this? My Google searches have not been successful. :) Thanks all! - Nick

Sounds like you're using SQL Server v7 which does not support SCOPE_IDENTITY() - you must use @@identity however be careful, triggers will alter @@identity to reflect the result of the trigger and not your proc. --> Nick

You should build your SQL statement as a nvarchar and then use sp_executesql: DECLARE @query NVARCHAR(500) SET @query = N'select top ' + CAST(@RecordPerPage AS NVARCHAR(5)) + N'* from MyTable... sp_executesql @query look at: http://msdn.microsoft.com/library/default.asp?url=/library/en-us/tsqlref/ts\_sp\_ea-ez\_2h7w.asp --> Nick

Any articles on saving delta values (only what was changed - much as Visual Source Safe's history) and then reconstructing the two? As a brief example: ORGINAL: The cow jumped over the moon."" NEW: "The horse jumped over the moon." DELTA would be "horse" - no need to save the entire ORGINAL. This can become complicated over revisions and I would rather not recreate fire when others already offer matches. Thanks!