For a change of pace, try Anonymous[^]. I'm not crazy about its tildes, but it's worth trying if you haven't seen it before. Jim Lamb

I used it to get into the recruiting pipeline for my current job. I also used it to find a buyer for the product I developed for my micro-ISV. I highly recommend it. Jim Lamb Professional Profile [^] Program Manager Microsoft Corp.

Microsoft has rarely held itself accountable for meeting its own logo requirements. Even VS.NET 2003 doesn't install correctly if you choose anything but the destination directory they default to - pathetic. MFC is so horribly antiquated at this point that they'll never get around to removing all of the deprecated API references and other obsolete baggage it has. ATL/WTL is only in slightly better shape. Unfortunately, the alternative is to develop your own framework which is not only time-consuming but likely to eventually suffer from the same problems. There's a word for this phenomenon: "entropy". It affects software just as much as anything else. Jim Lamb Brilliant Labs, Inc. http://brilliantlabs.com/[^]

I'm using in a new digital photo management product I've written. It was reasonably straightforward to use, but you have to get the linker settings just right for it to work correctly. You also have to pay close attention to the APIs that aren't supported (e.g. several printer related functions) and call their ANSI equivalents instead. It is a nice to get away from using ANSI as the lowest common denominator. I am having some issues with some of the software protection technologies that it seems to interfere with, but I've resolved most of those at this point. Regards, Jim Lamb Brilliant Labs, Inc. http://brilliantlabs.com/[^]

Marc, I've responded directly to you via e-mail. The beta@brilliantlabs.com address, linked to from the web site, has been converted to a mailing list for current beta testers. I've updated the link to mailto: info@brilliantlabs.com. I've also sent you the download instructions and release notes for the first external test build. Cheers, Jim Lamb Brilliant Labs, Inc. http://brilliantlabs.com/[^]

KaЯl, The application runs on Windows 98 and up. Thumbnails are loaded into memory one screen at a time, so nominal memory usage running full screen is around 20MB. You'll get better performance if you have 20MB free physical RAM to work with. The install includes the redistributables to update SHFolder.dll and ComCtl32.dll, so it doesn't require any particular version of IE other than the OS requirement already mentioned. Alpha blending effects are used and, it is a photo management app, so the faster your video card, the snappier it will be. It does require a color depth of at least 16-bits (256 color modes not supported for working with 24-bit JPEG images). It support pretty much any digital camera, but you'll get best results if your camera supports some version of EXIF and importing is easiest if your camera connects via USB (serial and TWAIN connections are not directly supported). I'll update the web site to include this information. Thanks for your feedback. Jim Lamb Brilliant Labs, Inc.

I'm looking for suggestions on how to find beta testers for a new product. I'm thinking of doing three successive rounds of external test. The first round would be a smaller set of more technically oriented testers. The second round would be a larger set of people including more intermediate type users. The third round would be the largest set including novice users. Thoughts? By the way, I've posted information about our beta release at: http://www.codeproject.com/script/comments/forums.asp?forumid=1651&select=551958#xx551958xx Jim Lamb Brilliant Labs, Inc.

We've put together a new digital photo management application. Our web site is still under construction, but you can get the gist of it here: http://brilliantlabs.com/[^] If you have a digital camera and you're interested in helping me test the software, please reply to this e-mail with your current contact information, a brief summary of your operating environment (hardware, OS, etc.) and the type of digital camera(s) you use. Jim Lamb Brilliant Labs, Inc.

It's not that the task pane is a bad idea, it isn't. But, like a lot of thier UI designs, Microsoft's is more concerned about how the screen shots will look in the marketing material than how usable it is on a daily basis. Task panes are a great replacement for dialog boxes that would be used to operate on your app's document/content. Unlike a dialog box that obscures the content beneath it and precludes navigation within that document while its active, a task pane does neither. It lets the user see what they're operating on and navigate around it. This does require more work on your part. You'll have to worry about handling object selection changes while your task pane is active, object deletions, and potential object creation. You can mitigate this somewhat by creating a pseudo-modal state where, when certain task panes are active, most or all of the menu and toolbar commands are disabled. You'll have to determine what works best for your users.

This is a click-wrap retail application. We're not asking our customers to download 23MB of MS code to run it ;P. Anyone know of a good solution for a native (as opposed to managed) Win32 application.

Can anyone recommend a good AutoUpdate (LiveUpdate) type component? I'm looking for something with a small footprint where I can provide my own UI and just use it as the query/download piece.

that you'll need more than just developers. ;P

Looks like that form gets a couple of posts a week. Don't think he'll get much feedback there.

and I hope you realized that not all of the feedback would be positive: 1. Hope all your visitors use a mouse and aren't dependent on accessibility software because your site has zero support for keyboard users. 2. On my 1600x1200 display, the navigational control labels on the main "page" are awfully hard to read, and my vision is about 20/30. 3. Noticed you provide your own "BACK" link since the entire site is Flash-based, you have to. It's to bad because I like my browsers Back function - I can invoke it from the keyboard, my trackball has a special button that activates it, I can click the toolbar button for it without even consciously thinking about it. Unfortunately, all it does on your site is take me back to an introductory animation that I didn't even want to see in the first place. 4. I might have wanted to copy and paste some of the verbiage from your web site into a proposal I'm writing to recommend a provider to outsource development to, but I can't because it's all flash graphics. It also appear to be quite badly anti-aliased to the point where it's uncomfortably fuzzy to read. That's all I have time for. Hope this helps you. Flash is great to create an eye-catching banner ad or to let users know about a new promotion. It's not suited, IMHO, for implementing an entire web site - even a small & simple one like yours.

than heaps and stacks. Does he have a good grasp of calculus, statistical analysis methods and algorithms? Can he write a functional specification, design document, or use case? Has he studied human factors and accessibility? Does he have enough aesthetic sense to put together a reasonably attractive user interface? Can he persuade a room full of developers that his approach is sound and that they should adopt it? I could go on and on, but I think you get the point. Coding is a relatively small, albeit important, part of a software engineer's job. Lots of people can code. Someone who can code but can't write a decent technical document or lead a team won't get very far. College won't necessarily teach someone these skills, but it certinaly affords them the opportunity to. Your brother might consider majoring in something other than CS since he feels he is already strong in this area. How about applied mathematics or chemical engineering? Some of the best architects I've worked with have had backgrounds in music. My degree is in Foreign Affairs (the Foreign Policy aspect of Political Science). I started coding in Basic when I was 12, moved onto Assembly when I was 14. I found that my University's CS department didn't have much to offer me. So, I studied something else. I learned critical thinking and how to form a well reasoned argument. I learned how to write - a skill which is sorely lacking in our field. Ten years after graduation, I was the Chief Technology Officer for an Inc. 500 company. Now I run my own business and, believe me, that requires a lot more than programming skills.

pretty much any software title you see on the shell was written in C/C++. It's still the #1 choice for products that have to run on diverse system configurations and still be reasonably stable. The thing about the higher level lanagues is opacity. With C++, you can throw away the MFC/ATL, etc. and work directly with the OS. Of course, the OS is still quite opaque (lots of black boxes), but you have quite a bit of flexibility. With Visual Basic, Delphi, etc. you just have more black boxes. This is both a good thing and a bad thing. It's good in the sense that you have more functionality available (less coding), but it's bad in the sense that if something doesn't behave the way you want or expect, you're stuck with it. Of course, if you work in C++, you're often still stuck with the way the OS works. I can't, for example, change the way Auto Play V2 works on Windows XP - it is what it is regardless of what programming language you're using.

This highlights the problem with ANSI encoding and reinforces the point that we should all be coding for Unicode. I'm guessing notepad is interpreting the byte sequence as a lead byte. On my system it shows up as far-eastern characters (Lucida console font which is Unicode and includes most character sets).

Just traded my 911 for a Cayenne S. With one kid (and a second on the way) and a dog, we needed more of a family vehicle. I'm planning to get another 911 at some point - I loved that car.

I own a 2001 S4 Avant and a 2000 A6 4.2. Audi makes a great car.

I've used it with VC 4 and 5 and wasn't very happy with it. But, I'm a bit of a control freak when it comes to class frameworks. Borland's OWL in their v4.5 C++ compiler was a nice framework, but they had a hard time keeping up with Microsoft's changing API's. I've been using WTL lately and I'm warming up to it. I don't generally like the way that templates tend to obfuscate code. And I really don't like the macro-madness in MFC, but WTL seems like a reasonable compromise.