Hey, thanks for that...works great.

and "NOT" have to concatenate strings together, I mean.

Actually, I'd rather use HtmlGenericControl so I can programatically add element attributes and have to concatenate strings together... Can I achieve this with HtmlGenericControl by overriding the render method or something?

Anybody know how to make the HtmlGenericControl output self-closing tags like instead of ? Should I set the InnerHtml or InnerText property to null or something like that?

I thought I would post this question here since it's a pretty good community of experts. The application I am in charge of architecting is an ASP.NET (intranet) web application running on IIS 5 or better - targeted towards .NET environments on Windows 2000 Server and/or Windows 2003 Server. It needs to be able to scale to meet the demand of hundreds or thousands of users (ie. work in a “web farm” environment). I have to be able to support both Oracle and SQL Server as the database that stores the data for the application. Security is an important concern since the application would be getting deployed within organizations that take security fairly seriously. I can count on at least Windows 2000 and at least IE 5.5 being on the desktop, though I’m not sure if the particular browser used to access the application should be much of a concern or not in terms of security. Ok, so here’s what I had in mind: Browser --> IIS --> ASP.NET --> Enterprise Services/COM+ --> SQL Server/Oracle (my thinking is that my data access code would run in the context of a COM+/ES component) I would like to be able to use Impersonation so that I could run the COM+ component under a certain user account (for my app only) and use Trusted_Connection in my connection string to SQL Server/Oracle (with OSAuthent=1; for the Oracle OLEDB driver). My reasons for wanting to do this are that 1) it seems to me like the most secure way to implement the connection and 2) I could use Windows to handle authentication instead of writing my own code to do so. Some questions/concerns I have:

1. I don’t hear much mention of using this impersonation technique with COM+/ES components. Is it just not well known or are there drawbacks I don’t know about?
2. I’ve been reading some newsgroup posts and it sounds like when using Impersonation you lose performance gained by connection pooling. Does anyone know if this is true or false?
3. If the Oracle database is hosted on Unix or Linux, is it still possible to connect using Impersonation?
4. Should I look at implementing transport-level security (like SSL) when the users authenticate to IIS?
5. Anything else I should be thinking about in regards to the tiers/architecture of this application?

Thanks in advance for any time & energy you can lend to me on this. Feel free to use this in your blog (if you have one) if you think it would help get more suggestions from readers or anything like that. Thanks, Jason Mauss

One thing I just thought about that I thought you might be wondering about - I'm not familiar enough with the control to know for sure whether or not it exposes events and other functionality that would make it easy to provide write-back (to MSSQL) functionality - if you are looking for that ability. I'm not saying it can't be done - Just wanted to say that in case you were wondering.

If you have all your data in MS SQL (the data related to tasks, and whatever else you want to display) then yeah, it shouldn't take you too long to build an app with it. You basically just apply a few cosmetic values so things look the way you want, define a table format for the records you'll be inserting and then loop through your data and insert nodes into the control. I think there is a user's/programmers' guide doc you can download in PDF. Seriously though, if you consider going with that control contact them and let them know if you need help or have questions. They're willing to help you with any questions you might have. I don't know as much about the control as some of the other guys there that have worked more closely with it. Jason

Our company sells an ActiveX Gantt Component. Take a look and download a trial if you want. Click Here Jason

Thanks for everyone's replies. I've read the books mentioned like Mythical Man Month and Psychology of Comp. Programming. They were indeed interesting and thought provoking. My main reason for starting this thread was because I think (arrogantly perhaps, I'll admit) that it's not as hard as everyone says it is to find top-quality developers. The reason I think that is mostly because of what I keep hearing from various places that say they know all the tricks to only hiring people who are the real deal. Maybe they're exaggerating, I can't really say I know for sure.:~ Jason

So I was having an IM chat w/ a colleague ("boss" if you will) this morning about the hiring/interview process. We're a small outfit and I'm the only one with real advanced development experience. As the company was starting out, we got burned by a guy who said he knew what he was doing but, ended up doing quite a crappy job, which left the company hurting pretty badly since we're not even 2 years old yet. The thing is, I wasn't responsible for assessing this guys skills. We were both hired at roughly the same time and he got placed as the "lead"...effectively becoming who I reported to. We both did the same work, it's just that he was supposed to be making the decisions (architecting the app, etc.) when he had no business doing so (based on how things ended up):sigh: Now after he's been let go we're almost in the position where we are going to need to get another Developer to help us. Here's where the disagreement/argument starts. From my point of view: 1. I don't think there are many Developers out there that could fool me into thinking their skills are better than they actually are. I talk the talk, walk the walk, and think I just have an inherent ability to know when someone is blowing smoke or not. 2. Over the years I've read a lot about tech interviews (Joel On Software, etc.) and about what kinds of questions to ask, and what personality traits to look for in good developers. I'm aware that the ways to tell whether someone is really talented is to discover things like how the person thinks/solves problems, not how many tech answers they can dish out. Now, my colleague perceives this as arrogance, not confidence, and says that it's impossible to never get burned by someone. He's been in business for quite a while (20 years or so) and seems to be set in this thinking. While I can agree it's impossible not to EVER get burned, I argue that if you are experienced and know what you're doing, you can reduce your chances of getting burned by a smoke blower down to almost nothing. Like only a 1 in 100 chance. I'm not really looking for a "who's right, who's wrong?" discussion, just your thoughts. Would anyone like to add their experiences? Jason