This is one of the joys of working in IOT. Finding energy to scavenge, continuously characterising power usage and making stuff work in reality. Software development has come to be working in giant frameworks needing vast processing, storage and connectivity that one little understands and uses a tiny part of. The discipline and problem solving required to do useful stuff in IOT end-devices is a refreshing change.

...and a not-so-nano antenna

From a similar place, but in a distant past, I would strongly recommend you look at offloading some of the HR. 25 employees is a lot to manage in totality. Especially if you also have a technical role. My take on HR is it not being about normal day-to-day. You don't need HR and actively shouldn't have HR between you and your fellow employees for normal life. HR is about compliance, which in some juristrictions is complex, and often bizarre. It is very much about giving you tools to manage when things go wrong. Like insurance. I don't plan to total the car but when the Tesla didn't see me at the lights, be good to have an insurance company to deal with Elon. I think HR is really quite a difficult task. Building the processes that work for your organisation and giving you compliance and tools for when things break without becoming intrusive in employee relations. Employee relations is not HR's job. In summary, I wouldn't recommend a 'young and personable HR graduate'. That could easily subsume you in the process and offload the important 'getting on with your employees' bit which you and personable HR graduates enjoy much more than the hard yards of compliance and process. I would strongly recommend looking for a competent outsource organisation which can help you with compliance and processes at arms length. I realise that may be hard to find as, at least in my distant past, the industry has its share of dudes with fins and teeth who will only talk to the 'decision maker'. Good luck with the task.

Another vote for the Salae. I use one for hardware and interrupt timing debug. Absolutely essential. I recently 'race tuned' (well, raceish) an ESP32 to PI SPI interface and literally could not have done that without the device. The pro version also has an analog mode, which, while not perfect, is good enough to deduce some quite subtle hardware/software interactions. I found running the device on a separate PC from my debug system was essential in that instance. It is expensive but has survived much abuse. Divide the cost by the hours I've saved has avoided me working for sub-Maccas hourly rates on a couple of projects.

I bought VisualGDB a couple of years ago for a project with a Raspberry PI, ESP32 and the CC1310 (Sub GHz Arm based RF processor). For the Pi and ESP, it worked well. Hid a lot of the gory detail of the build environment setup. Support was fast and competent when getting it going. I now don't know what bits are VS and what are VGDB so have to keep subscribing to support the, now completed, project. VGDB seems to stay out of the way when doing Microsoft stuff on the same VS. Remote debug works a treat on the PI, a few limitations with the ESP32 but still useful. The CC1310, sadly, wasn't supported but they said you can script an environment for other processors if you have the time and inclination. I am happy enough with CCS for that part however. Overall, would, knowing what I know now, buy it again. All up, VGDB saved me a lot of time, avoiding all the intimate build and debug stuff I didn't want to get involved in. Better focus on the application. Proviso is, I was being very vanilla about the PI and ESP32 parts so no experience of non-standard usages and I am an old school, monitor and tag debugger so didn't stretch the debugging much. Hope it is a little helpful.

There are 20 and 24pin PDip EEPLDs in stock at Mouser.

Just to close it off for prosperity. I have a data table, filled by a table adapter with '...WHERE(PK=@PK)'. It had a single row in it. I added another row (.NewRow, .AddRow). The Rows count of the table was 2. Index [0] pointed to the old origional data. Index [1] pointed to the new data, DataRowState=Added. I then called the table adapter.update (a rather large INSERT statement) There was still a count of two rows but both [0] and [1] pointed to the same row, the origional. This would indicate the data table of the dataset is no longer valid after an Update. I then did another fill and the data table had both rows as before (now unchanged state). The reason for writing this is to record for other people that may fall into this minor but time consuming trap. The tableAdapter.Update call is the end of the road for the validity of the data table data. There isn't a lot of documentation or web resource that tells you this. It maybe obvious to seasoned .NET database engineers, and maybe standard practice. It would be unexpected to new entrants in this field with experience of other, dare I say it, more normal, caching systems. Thanks for the help. Ooops, I modified Table Adapter to refer more correctly to the data table of the dataset where referring to storage.

Thanks. Just a simple question, after the update, could I assume the rows are all still in the TableAdapter and do the Find or Select then? Thanks

I guess this is the problem with the 'standard methodology'. It is kinda hard comining into it to understand the conventions. There certainly isn't a lot except experience that would tell you an update rearranges the cache. A view from other worlds would be that a data cache wouldn't change after a write to the source, thus preserving some independance between the user and source. Been doing a lot of reading and SQLCommands are looking attractive, but copying across the database update will get my machines working tomorrow. Thanks for taking the time to respond.

I am doing an update to my database after adding a row to the data table. The TableAdapter uses the VS2005 generated INSERT command (the table has a lot of columns). The line is... DishVarTA.Update(CurrentStDishVarRow); where 'CurrentStDishVarRow' points to the row in the 'Added' state. My problem is that I want to use the row data after this statement to format and send off to some machinery. After the Update however 'CurrentStDishVarRow' points to an entirely different row. I think the INSERT statement in the TableAdapter is putting the new row in at the beginning of the table so the row indexing changes. Is there any way I could preserve the pointer, or is the only way to fill the table again and/or find it again? Done a lot of searching and haven't found much that covers this, does that mean preserving row pointers across updates is not 'de rigeur'? Thanks,

I would enthusiastically agree with Offline Files in XP. I have a Vista machine for development and an XP laptop which I take on site. The laptop has virtual drives for the various jobs which are 'available offline'. I rely on it and have for a couple of years with all manner of applications. It is very 'set and forget'. Downside is the slow synchronization when you leave or rejoin the network and you need to keep an eye on new subdirectories, that they have the little blue arrow as sometimes, if you haven't appeased the appropriate diety before they are created they aren't set for offline.

I think the NRA defence for Microsoft might be applicable. The problem IE has is the content it is increasingly required to display. If you run a minimalist version, every web site is constantly requiring you to flash, pop-up and all manner of other stuff. I used to have the Sydney Morning Herald as my home page but that became too slow with ads, pop-ups pop-overs, videos, slide-shows and who knows what before even a line of real news made it to the screen. IE has remained constant while that site bloated to unusability It is the same with so many other sites. Word has a similar problem. A good 'executive' document must have all manner of headings, index's references, drawings, pictures.... Word is merely the messenger. Visual Studio has its quirks, but I recently have been working on a project using VCL with BDS6. That has reminded me how easy the entry to VS is. Outlook and SQL Management Studio though...you have identified the dinosaurs.

Thanks Roger. It does seem like the standard exhaustive read is my more intelligent option. I have been looking at some of the old MSDN (Allen Denver, Serial Communications in Win32, 1995) and there is an EV_RXFLAG which happens in response to an event character you can set in the DCB. That does mean Overlapped receiving though which is too much for this really simple task. I was hoping I could achieve that 'One-line' as .NET2 does with ReadLine. Makes for very simple code. Thanks again for your time in responding.

I know this is a simple question that I will regret answering. I am currently working in Borland C++ Builder (VCL) on adding some serial port activity to an older Windows project. No .NET (just yet). Rather than character by character processing messages (NMEA) from a number of serial ports I would like something simple like 'Readline' in .NET2 or an 'fgets'. Reading to a '\n' and timeout. I have done a bit of searching and found a lot of read character by character examples. Does anyone have the magic line at hand of code or recall how to read a text line?

I have managed a product development group, both hardware design and manufacture and software. I would strongly second Franks advice. A 9000 certification requires you to have an effective process, know it (documented) and be able to demonstrate you know what you are making and can make it. All auditors I have dealt with (in Aus) have been of that viewpoint. Consultants are not going to help you much as the important aspect is you knowing your own processes. If the processes are simple, well understood in your organisation and you can confidently show they cause you to know what you make, ISO certification is not difficult. Avoid the jargon! People make an awful hash of ISO because they over complicate and end up with unmanageable processes they don't understand. One more point. You should know why you need to do this. In lots of industries ISO 9000 is not that necessary (assuming you are in control of you operation anyway). If you are selling to a large Telco or partner, they often have specific requirements. If it is EU there are lots of interesting directives to understand. Good luck!

I have been a desktop facist for years (screen, grunt, price, user interface....) but recently bought my first own laptop (previously used, reluctantly, various company ones for travel/onsite/presentation stuff) for development. I avoided high level video and went for appropriate processor and memory. Think about battery life. The freedom of no cords is awesome, especially if you do industrial stuff, presentations and travel. I started off using plugin screens and keyboard at home and craved a docking station then Voila...remote desktop. Offline files are pretty simple to keep things together as well. Just like being there over a local segment. Wouldn't be without the laptop now.

Only 3 or 4 a year, read on the train or in other quiet times. I find turtorials and actually doing stuff better to remember and understand a language or aspect of the more general software engineering task. I find books are very useful to broaden my understaning . They help me develop standards and ways of doing things often pop-up later from stuff that sinks in, unbeknownst while reading a book. Couple of recent favourites as I have been returning to C++ after an extended sojourn in C# are; C++ Coding Standards - Sutter & Alexandrescu and C++ Common Knowledge - Dewhurst.

I just received the call to renew my VS2005 Pro and MSDN for around $1500 in Australia today. I cannot make up my mind whether to continue on. I use MSDN and feel kinda secure being subscribed but mostly use the free stuff. The renewal is much the same cost as a new subscription. I would expect the impending (one hopes) SP1 will be accessible to all. The test licenses for the OS and things go on forever, the articles are free on the MS site. I use VS for part of the fairly standard development consultancy work I do but avoid the 'cutting edge' like most. I would appreciate anyone else with a view on whether renewing makes sense in their world?