You may have replied before I added my edit:

Quote:

Not saying there is any evidence either way, but neither is the quoted statement. It's not really a speghetti monster, more of a statement of the constraints of belief in such a speghetti monster.

Sounds like a spaghetti monster, but that sentence is phrased kind of backward. The idea is that IF we are likely to become posthuman, and run simulations of ourselves, then the humans in those simulations are likely to do the same, and so on, until there is a large number of simulations. In that case, the probability of us being the very first simulators is very small, so we are almost certainly living in one of the simulations. So I think the point of the above statement is that you can't believe we are likely to become posthumans capable of simulating ourselves, unless you also believe we are almost certainly in a simulation. Not saying there is any evidence either way, but neither is the quoted statement. It's not really a speghetti monster, more of a statement of the constraints of belief in such a speghetti monster.

Yeah, most of the UI in my apps are basically data entry forms or displays, and most of the fields are short, 25-50 chars. They actually work better when the size is set explicitly, for example if the user maximizes a window, it usually doesn't make since for a text box to span the entire screen. Occasionally I need a control to scale, so I simply remove the Width property manually. But in general, I use the designer to set my sizes and positions.

The most productive feature of XAML: COPY PASTE EDIT. I've found that ANYTHING I want to do in XAML is documented on a blog somewhere, COPY PASTE EDIT. You can't COPY PASTE EDIT a screenshot of a WinForm. Also, don't be afraid to use the designer to drag and drop buttons, labels, textboxes, etc. from the Toolbox. Visual Studio will autogenerate working XAML for you, and usually the only XAML you need to add by hand is the databindings. Then COPY PASTE EDIT this autogenerated XAML to create the rest of your controls.

XPS is just XML compressed with zip. (If you change the file extension from .xps to .zip, you can view the contents with WinZip) Once you figure out how to load it into VB.Net, (try looking up PrintDocument) you should be able to traverse the XML. Depending on the format of the report, you should be able to recover the data into a usable format. But that sounds like a lot of work to avoid if possible :)