Chris, Congrats on creating this place, I'm impressed. Want to help by reporting a small bug. (I cringe even writing the word since my boss tells me there are no bugs in his code. What am I fixing all day I wonder.) Every now and again in the lounge on dynamic update,the page is loading twice. Could be that I have a huge email I'm sending at the same time. Hope it helps, Ivan.

I like something Dr Gui wrote in one of his articles in the MSDN library. "I'm not a real Dr. But I sure know a lot of herbal remedies." I am more impressed with someone that can explain their ideas so that they are easy to understand, and their ideas are new and interesting, not the title they hold. My Uncle just retired from Head of Robotics at Caimbridge. He was given a PHD while he held the position. Goes to show that not everyone has to earn them. Being friends with the right people also helps a lot to getting a lot of things in this world. :)

Another language I have had the opportunity to look at and am learning to code with at the moment is Delphi. It has the advantage of being very easy to build gui's. Ie it has the drag and drop an object onto a form capability. I also have full access to the windows API, GDI etc. It has full com access. It is OOP. The syntax is much like pascal. Very similar to most programming languages so the overhead of learning the syntax is minimal. Delphi has the advantage of making a lot of programming tasks that are complicated in VC simpler because Delphi provides wrappers to the API functions. Printing becomes a breeze. Database access is very simple indeed. Delphi comes with an extensive set of controls which make building applications very easy, and produce professional results. I earge you to have a look at it. It surprised me that I had never heard of it before because it is a full fledged language that will allow you to do anything you like. Borland supplies this product.

I just got my first job recently and it seems we are in the same position. It would be great if we could be given some type of schedule so that we might know if we are doing good or bad.

Number theory at 14, I think we have the next Einstein. The subject also interests me. I doubt you'll find many books on number theory in your local library (I do not know though). A good place to start with number theory is to visit UWA's mathematics site. Should be able to find it from www.uwa.edu.au. Look for the mathematics department. They have an introductory course on Group Theory. (all the notes on the web.) which I am fairly sure is another name for number theory. this is called '2GA2'. It covers Non Euclidean geometry which is a complicated name for the mathematics to create 3D graphics. Quake3 uses this stuff! The second half of the course is introductory group theory - looking at the patterns in numbers, and using them to prove a lot of theories you have not had the chance to see yet. The great think about number theory is that is an alternative way to learn mathematics. number theory proves the base principles that you and your teachers take for granted which is why I like the subject and hope to do more of it in the future. It is possible to learn number theory from scratch without other mathematical prerequisites, but very hard to because people design the courses with the student already have achiving 1 and half years of university level maths. This is not to say that it is impossible and I sincerly hope you give it a good try because there is a lot of wonderful things to learn. As for the symbols, the only advice on that I can give is start slowly and concentrate on trying to learn what the symbols mean. Each symbol encompasses a lot of ideas which when the person understands that symbol he actually understands that concept. Its only when all these symbols (concepts) are put together that it enables one to being able to describe the complicated mathemathical concepts. Best wishes Ivan

I'm from Western Australia. Looks like we cover the whole continent. Must be contagious.

It is so hard to find a good computing book where every detail in it is correct. Putting trust in something and then half an hour later finding out that the assumption from the book is indeed incorrect is one of my banes. It almost becomes quicker to perform some trial and error to find out the result yourself. Another problem I find with books is that the author simply copies information from another book, or the MSDN library for that matter, and then publishes it to make a quick buck. I hope authors put more time into the information they present as fact.

Upgrading the initial environment to the max (4096) instead of auto under the memory tag of properties let me increace the amount of text displayed. :) yay. Now how to get it to scroll....

Can you please be a little more specific. I can get to the properties screen, but I can not find the layout tag (I use Win98 if this is to do with it). I would love to be able to scroll so I can stop using Unix's " | More" command to view c#'s compiler errors.

Because I've been using computers since DOS was invented, I learned from a younge person to use DOS, and old habbits die hard. xcopy /s still comes in very useful. I was wondering why Microsoft hasnt upgraded DOS. Command prompt has several advanatages over the Windows System. Unix users know of these very well. I think it is about time Microsoft made the DOS window enabled to be anysize, scrollable, and upgrade the commands. Surely one of the Microsoft Developers must have thought of this before because it would help DOS compete with UNIX. And I'm sure it wouldnt be hard to do. Do you think they are afraid of touching Bill Gates's code?

Small point, but it does not imply this in totality. The internal variables and variables that need validation so a set method is a necessity would be private. But this is a stupid point of mine, having them all as get and set and is for booleans makes life easier for developing as we dont have to worry about whether a variable is public or private since they are all accessed with get. I've noticed a lot of programmers would program a Point class like this though: public class point{ public int x,y; public point(int x, int y){ this.x = x; this.y = y; } } so maybe simple endpoints in code its allowed????

Alright, I stand corrected get and set should be used. I was just trying to raise some interest by taking an unusual position :P I enjoy examining the base principles we program from to check if they are right or not. Following rules for the sake of it has never been me :) Well I learned a lot thankyou. The main reasons for keeping them as I see now is that because its industry standard, and we dont all follow the same practices, we make our own lives that little bit harder. Second point is that its easy to remember get and set when looking for the methods in the interfaces and "is" for that matter. Validation using get and set never occured to me, thanks :) I think a class can look after itself quite easily without the accessor methods. I think a method should do something a little more than return a datatype. Maybe manipulate data then return it. otherwise typing theclass.getX() or theclass.x is rather trivial. Although I do not mean to say we should not use get/set just that this arguement for get/set is poor. One of the pros for the unusual position is that it may be more efficent to access to variable directly rather than having a stack assignment of the method call. C++ developers seem to love the supreme efficiency c++ provides, but they also will be using the get/set methods to make there already hard code easier to read. In my opinion this same sacrificing of efficiency for ease of development will be why c++ will die out and languages like java and c# will take over. After all java and c# are much more easier to develop with and are able to produce very comparable products to c++ in a lot less time. C++ will probably become a language for hackers who enjoy the thrill of getting the most out of the computer. Neural Computation and real time apps will probably still enjoy it for there need to be efficient.:cool:

I remember reading in many books and being tought at uni that when programming in the OOP style we should use get and set methods to read and write properties. Supposedly this controls access to the variables. Now that I have left uni and dont have anyone marking my work anymore, I have left this principle where I think it belongs - not existing. I myself have never had any problems accessing a variable by accident (might be because my code has never exceded 3000 lines) Forgoing this principle has made my code much easier to read, and less to type. What do you think?

I just tried to submit some feedback to the articles in the ASP section on the opensource codeproject forum section. This submital had html markup in it and it didnt submit properly. Is there a solution to this?

I can see your point from having vast c++ experience, The .Net runtime would seem a step backwards from the power c++ gives to programmers. Probably also an annoyance seen as though you've put so many hours becoming proficent in c++. I think the trend the computing world is heading in is towards getting a lot more programmers up and capabale of producing software in a quicker amount of time in both learning and implementation aspects. The .NET architecture helps both of these points by abstracting away from complicated code you have come to know and love. I do not think you have to worry though, c++ is still the more powerful language as long as you can keep up with the pace of programmers using simpler languages like Java and c# you still should earn more money, in my opinion anyway. Was wondering where you managed to find a copy of the Visual Studio 7 IDE. I'd like to have a look at this as well.:-O

My limited experience with .NET has been to have a look at c# and what it can offer to old fashion windows programming. I decided to try and port one of my Java programs to c# and was impressed with the extra functionality c# provides in creating userdefined components over Java. The delegate system for creating Events seems a very intuitive approach for event assignment. Not being able to have a pointer to a function is one of Java's descrepancies. One thing that Java has which c# might like to add to its libraries is the Layout Managers. I'm currently creating my own to make porting from java to c# easier. Another hitch I've found which is probably just my lack of knowledge is getting the KeyCodes from KeyEvents. It seems that not all the keys on the keyboard are listed in the KeyCode documentation (the slash "/" was the one I was looking for) The distribuatable runtime is what concerns me the most. I'm not quite sure how it works, but if its anything like sun Java's counterpart, it makes distribution of the program that little bit harder. I prefer giving a program to the customer and all they have to know how to do is run the program and use it. Asking them to install a runtime is a bit much for a lot of people. Although the benefits of the .NET architecture seem awesome. Giving programming teams the option for individuals to program in any language they like and still being able to mesh all the parts together seems great for teams. Me not having to learn COM any more is a great advantage. (It does look a bit daunting to the uninitiated, trust me.) ASP.NET offers huge advanatages in time saving, I'm hoping this doesnt lead to lazy programmers. With autovalidation of form elements and a whole host of new controls, for example the Table controls (sorry cant remember the name of the specific one) save the programmer from re-inventing the wheel every time they start a new app. All in all I think .NET is great - Any one know how much it costs to buy Visual Studio 7 in Australia? .NET looks like it will be the future of Computing for many reasons.:) (a bit out of context - anyone know if there are additional compatablitlity issues with RDS for ASP other than must use IE4 upwards?):confused:

I'm having my first mess around with Remote Data Services in my ASP programming endeavers to see if I could create the newsgroup style feedback we currently love at the CodeProject. My computer (win98) has FrontPage extensions installed which I use for my asp programming. I use Microsoft Access 97 for the database. I've consciencously typed in some code I found in a book that uses win2000, IIS and SQL Server, more than likely the latest editions of each. To my dismay, when I try to bind information to a table, I get a blank table. It seems difficult to work out if the sql call is actually getting information from the database (cant find a way to test this). Was wondering if someone knows if it is the software I am using or (more than likely) my code. :confused: cheers :)