Is there some reason the keyboard from the broken computer can't be used?

You know, you can Minimize the Ribbon, in which case it takes up about as much space as a old-school menu bar.

Actually, if you are compiling against .NET 3.5 so that your code works with 3.5 AND 4.0, then the issue is likely that you are using server-side components. .NET 4.0 is broken up into a Client Profile and Extended versions. .NET 4.0 by default only installs the Client Framework when installed on a client machine. Server-side (defined by Microsoft) components are not included (to keep the install size down). You can install them with the .NET 4.0 EXTENDED Framework, after which I would expect your service to work. If you set your compile target to .NET 4.0 Client Profile, you can discover which components are missing (because they are only in extended in 4.0), and possibly remove them if you want it to work with the 4.0 Client Profile.

Well, since Event Handlers can be named as well, you could create self-documenting code without necessarily having to create a separate method. Of course, if your event handler is button18_Click that isn't going to work.

http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa691306%28v=vs.71%29.aspx[^] This (from Microsoft) includes & and | in the logical operators. And semantics aside, they can and sometimes should be used as such in C# - for those cases where you want a logical operator without short-circuiting (i.e. one of the operands is a method call with side-effects - which would be a whole nother type of questionable practice, but the language allows it and it has is uses). So in that sense the OP is correct, & and && do the same thing except && short-circuits. Of course, they don't do exactly the same thing, because & can also be used on non-boolean types as a bitwise operator. So (4 & 5) is meaningful, whereas 4 && 5 is not.

You can usually Minimize the Ribbon - in which case it behaves a little more like a traditional menu, click on a tab and the options drop down - which helps with the screen real estate issue. My company went with a Ribbon so it looks "modern" and "cutting edge" - but haven't had complaints from customers, and sales seems to like it. Quick Access toolbar is a nice feature (although it can also be implemented with traditional menus).

You can export your settings and then re-import them after the reinstall.

One of the reasons the implementation details are not in the documentation, is because they can change with new versions of .NET. The implementation details are intentionally hidden from the user so they can be modified/improved if needed, while providing the same external functionality (and general performance characteristics). If you want to explore the details of the implementation for a particular version of .NET, then Reflector/ILSpy/etc is the way to go. But don't count on those details to be the same in the next release.

Code review. Some good tools are Code Collaborator by SmartBear and Crucible by Atlassian (Crucible is only $10 for small teams).

Gotta be a Brit if 'Olivia' sounds like 'I live here'....

I think most of these replies miss the main point - VBA is easy, whether it is ugly or not. Any developer that can't figure out how to hack up some macros in Excel isn't worth squat. It is designed to be used by non-programmers, and I know plenty of accountant types that can throw together a macro (usually starting with the record function and tweeking from there) - so if someone calling themselves a programmer cannot figure it out, they should find a new occupation.

I've used MySQL and SQL Express for free databases (also SQL Server standard and enterprise) - SQL Express is good if you are familiar with SQL Server, and your database won't exceed 10 GB (2008) or 4GB (2005-). Doesn't have all the bells and whistles of the full version, but has all the data storage features. The InnoDB engine in MySQL supports transactions and foreign keys, and my experiences with it were quite good. I left the company I developed a fairly large project with quite a bit of data being processed and they switched to SQL Server - only to see the data upload (this happened weekly or monthly for every client, and they were looking to do some clients daily - several GB of flat file upload) take 3 times as long with SQL Server. Which is to say, while you may prefer SQL Server, I wouldn't consider MySQL a toy (although I would be concerned with the current politics surrounding it). Currently I maintain a .NET application running over SQL Server - we use Express for small customers (some even run SQL Server and application on the same desktop), and standard or enterprise for larger customers - nice thing is the codebase is the same, just change the connection string.

That's ridiculous when for $300 you can get a Core2 Duo with 4GB RAM. The productivity increase would pay for itself with a couple months at most.

An example is simple - I wrote a WPF application. Now there is a desire from our customers to have pieces of it available from the web. Since I separated the UI layer from the business logic layer, it is easy to build some Silverlight pages to show the information through a webpage. If I hadn't separated the layers, I'd basically be re-writing the application. Just because your bone-headed architect went overboard doesn't mean the fundamental idea is flawed - lots of good ideas can suffer through poor implementation. And crappy programmers can screw up code in any genre... that doesn't mean we should all go back to coding in assembly. (And for the record, I spent a good chunk of my career programming in RPG (procedural language) before switching to primarily OO languages, and I much prefer the OO languages).

Short answer - You can't. It is a data READER - not an updater. It's not like opening a recordset in VB6. You need to ExecuteSQL with appropriate SQL to udpate the records (i.e. UPDATE table SET field=value WHERE key=id). To do it the way you want it would better to use a DataSet or something a little more robust - plenty of info on MSDN.

Funny - those all sound like problems with your VB IDE (granted, not a lot of options there), not the language itself. (Which has plenty of reasons to hate it).

This is a site for software developers right? So write the program yourself. If enough other people find it useful you can make a buck. If you are not a developer, find one and pay/partner with them to do it. Haven't looked into it myself, but I am aware of Windows programs that take over the desktop and/or window positioning systems, so apparently it is possible.

Well, if your ON INSERT Trigger only deletes records - you aren't going to get a circularity problem.

Well, do you really want your service to work with data in the database that has been tampered with? Depending on the number of scheduled emails (due to memory constraints), you could have the service be the sole keeper of the email information - and only write to the database as a backup store. Then you have much more control over the process - the service gets and tracks the requests - if it is caching to the database (or other store), then it can control how long in the future to cache, and so will know when to pull from the db again. (Imminent tasks can also be stored in the db for failover purposes, but won't have to be looked up unless the service is restarted for some reason).

Lovely - "cost isn't really an issue" - because there are no taxpayer dollars going to waste on this. The real problem is that is how government IT views the costs - as not an issue, so they waste money. It's crap!