There's a free way to integrate Tortoise with Visual Studio that I use and enjoy: http://blog.programmerslog.com/?p=4[^]

That's kind of funny, not really a supporting example. Amazon.com was launched in 1995[^], 14 years ago, using the tools, languages, and frameworks of that time (let alone 10 years ago). Given the Linux technology platform[^] it's based on, it wouldn't surprise me at all if a lot of the services were written in C/C++, though I'll grant you definitely not with Visual Studio which didn't have its first release until 1997[^]. :)

My vote is also for Flex, although now that Silverlight is at version 2 there's a lot of great things to say about it as well. RIAs are, in my opinion, the way to go though. Better separation of concerns, better security, real application development environment and languages, incredibly easy deployment, clients are always up-to-date without any effort, the list goes on and on.

Chris has us all beat, but I do love my job. I work on RIAs (Rich Internet Applications) every day in Silverlight (and sometimes Flex). In other words, I write software with a big emphasis on communicating with humans, things like usability and just plain polish. It's always fun to see your software running on random people's computers (and even more for them to be excited about it). :)

I agree, if you have miles or make enough extra income fly out as often as possible. I did this for about 4 months and even though it doesn't sound like much time, it was kind of a big deal for me/us. If I can avoid it I wouldn't do it again, but I don't regret doing it that once. Try to stay connected with her day to day life and fill her in on yours.

Excel is sort of a hybrid MDI app so it doesn't open more than one instance of itself by default even if it looks like it did. That's why hitting the X in the corner will close all documents, not just that one. Plus, you can't have two spreadsheets up in front of you at the same time, which drives me bonkers. You can get around that and the 2 documents with the exact same name silliness by going the long way through the start menu to open another empty Excel instance (it will complain that PERSONAL.XLS or some such is locked, just ignore it won't cause any problems).

The image URL should work like any normal ASP.NET page, just set the cookie, probably based upon the GET variables. (Look up Response.Cookies and Request.QueryString.) Using an tag seems a little bit like a hack and therefore I wouldn't guarantee it would be totally future proof though. Instead I would just use a hidden IFrame, which expects a normal HTML source instead of an image. In domain2 you just set your cookie like normal . If clicking the button is what sends the user to domain2, why not skip any cross domain cookie access and just POST the data ala a form to domain2 when they click the button instead of it being a vanilla link. That would seem to me to be the cleanest approach. Domain2 can then set its cookie appropriately based on the POST (see Request.Form).

We use ABCpdf. The Pro version is ~$400 but if you don't mind linking to their site they give it to you for free. It has the advantage that you can create your own form elements - which was important for us. It's also pretty easy to work with and is quite fast. Works for web or apps (we use it for web). http://www.websupergoo.com/abcpdf-1.htm

You could use the old iframe trick. You can load an iframe with anything the client has access to, have the iframe hidden, and access its contents via javascript. What we use to do before XMLHTTPRequest was ubiquitous but more work involved.

This Dilbert expresses my experiences best I think: http://www.dilbert.com/comics/dilbert/archive/images/dilbert2007366590531.gif[^] :cool:

May not be exactly what you're looking for but Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software[^] by Charles Petzold is one of my all time favs, is pretty timeless, and though very dense is a fun read.

I share Maunder's phobia, ya never know when they will turn on you![^] (Reuters) :omg:

It's been a little while since I had to deal personally with any US telecoms (thankfully!) but I think it's a stretch to say the market has opened up, especially for baby bell Bell South. If you mean AT&T vs. Bell South, then I would agree with that statement. On the developer platform side of the world, however, there isn't nearly the kind of government interference yet, and I personally like having variety and competition. Sometimes its nice to be the big fish in the smaller pond, for instance, and service goes dramatically up. But then, my thinking tends to lean a lot closer to Marc and Ennis, where I don't like tools that require tight coupling but prefer to have a more modular setup. Good for coding and good for tools for the same reasons - at least for my style.

:-D Sounds like a nice German thing then. Over here state regulated monopolies are notorious for playing the blame game even amongst their own departments. Can't tell you how many times, when working in the southern US, I called Bell South and was redirected ten times within the same company eventually making a full circle and tearing out my hair! :mad:

Good point. If you really like one solution you tend to try to play favorites with it too, even if others are comparable. For better or worse, few types of workers get as religious about their tools as programmers! ;P

In my experience, most developers love to play around with lots of different technologies and compare competing products and vendors. It's usually management that has the fear. The old "nobody is fired for buying IBM" because it was so standard, which today is "nobody is fired for buying Microsoft". Those Developers that do like vendor lock-in are usually more interested in if the technology works with their tools of choice (ie Visual Studio) rather than the vendor themselves I think, but again, this is all just from personal experience.

I was home schooled because I was bored in public school and we couldn't afford a private school in our area that appeared to do better. I don't think there were any ill effects and I certainly wasn't anti-social. I'd highly recommend it in a lot of cases. Just like public school there's lots of good experiences and lots of bad. I think it is kind of silly to try to stereotype those religious-hippie-homeschoolers.. :rolleyes: Where I live now in Idaho, USA, we have a public-home school sponsored by the state. :) The Virtual Academy is a public school run from home, in essence, with the parents as the teachers. Basically it is an organization that supports the homeschooling and ensures lots of standardized tests and social interaction. Best of all worlds as long as there's a parent that can afford to stay home. The kids tend to do really, really well from what I understand and we plan to go that route with my daughter (but she's not old enough yet).

Also highly recommend. One of the rare gems of a technology book that won't soon become outdated. :-D

Southern Idaho / Eastern Oregon CPians out there? :cool:

I liked Wise (give it a 3) for its recording feature that let you manually install and it would watch and give you a head start on the project. Our company's MARKETING department decided to use InstallShield (give it a 2) instead because.. get this.. the name recognition. Something about making our product look more professional, like anyone judges a product based on a fly-by installer logo. :doh: Talk about company policy in the way. Didn't like it much but that didn't matter because InstallShield was then given to another department (because it was to be so 'easy' the devs wouldn't need to use it). ;) Like another poster mentioned, InstallShield sunk the other department and we were forced to look around for free alternatives to make the product ship (supposedly temporarily). I used InnoSetup (give it a 4) like everyone else and liked it but ran into many limitations. Found NSIS (gets a 4.5) and after a couple tutorials had the thing figured out and had all the functionality we needed times 10. That was my last job but currently we use NSIS happily too.