Dev Express support is *superb*. The best I have ever had from a 3rd paty tool vendor bar none. I.e. actually stays with you to solve the problem. $350 is *nothing*, really. It's less than a day of a competent developer's time.

Best project manager I ever had was an ex-engineer too. Maybe it was no tendancy to try to micro-manage...

yeah - there are lots of engineering grads in financial development - it seems a particularly good match.

I started at 9 on ZX80s then ZX81 then Spectrums. Fortunately the manuals for the ZX81 and Spectrum were *superb* in terms of teaching you some actual principles (as was a book on Z80 machine code, by, I think, the same author. I have several innante talents that I think helped me immensely then and now. I read ridiculously fast (up to 1100 wpm!)good memory - ideal for fast learning. I have natural facility for languages, an inbuilt drive to spot the patterns/deduce the rules/simplify - a reductionist tendancy, I suppose. Logic comes easy to me, ditto abstraction. I hate repetition and automatically optimise *any* task (at leasts in my head). I come from a family of (numerically talented) engineers, so maybe there's some design/fault finding abilities there (plus we did all our own car maintenance - awfully akin bug fixing). My dad can be extremely pedantic (partly as humour) so I learned to be rather precise in how I phrased things very early... There wasn't much computing at school, I recall by the time there was one Scotvec (bonus points for anyone who recalls those!) in Computing in Engineering, taught by a Techie teacher - by that point I was much better than the poor guy (I recall correcting a flowchart of his to make the algorithm more general/extensible). I did a 4-year BSc, where I learned many many things that I have since forgotten, but started to develop and become very familar with certain prinicples I use to this day - I have been a (Classic) Test Driven Developer since my *2nd* assignment (you can guess how the first went.... almost late and frantic... just like too many real ones). Set logic was invaluable, as was its companion - database design and SQL (Oracle back then). I did Cobol too. (ah, 4-tape master/detail merges - weirdly actually useful in all sorts of odd circumstances since - not with tapes, of course.) The importance of requirements gathering and documentation was drummed in ... By the time I got my first job (Cobol), I was well on the way to having a good foundation - learning particular languages/frameworks takes time as ever, and I had to pick up OO (was 'faking it' it via interfaces and code generators etc since VB4), I suppose that I feel that the time at uni bolstered an innate talent, giving it a framework to hang subsequent knowledge upon. I think it can really make a difference - especially the database stuff - there are so, so many horribly designed ones out there... So, intiailly self taught, educated, learned on the job. Still learning (it never stops) som

Tortoise + Visual SVN is pretty damned good. Never eve heard of Ankh, though...

I second the Visual SVN recommendation - for normal day-to-day source control. Though we are only just starting to set up our branch/merge strategy (everything is on trunk at the mo) so I'll reserve judgement until I see how easy that is. I must say it's more than a trifle annoying that there seems no indicator in VS as to which branch you are connected - and most tortoise boxes ony show the local path. The Java guys using Subclipse can see what branch they are in. Still, I am sure we will work it out. I kinda miss the VSS 'locked' icon though so you know someone else is working on stuff. Still, locking source is a whole different strategy... (Which you can do in SVN, it's just you get no indication - until you try to commit. Not quite the same)

:-) I've thought about a book/paper. Maybe I should - as it'll probably take a good few years before anybody else gets round to it. (unless it already exists... or someone else is now inspired to do it)

What are the signs of getting burned out? Getting tired of being (approximately) 10 years ahead of the curve (in my personal case, 'Agile' type development, ORM/data layers, frameworks, TDD/Unit testing frameworks/continuous integration - I've written my own tools for them all... since back when I was at uni in the 80's...) Realising it's only the illusion of change that we have in development. Realising that you are writing the same damn apps over and over - whilst the tech changes under you so fast that you actually are no better/faster at actually delivering a working product. Being tired of running to stand still - if you study really hard *in your own time* you can just about stay as good as you were after about 5 years in the biz. In the few areas where there is design continuity, being tired of seeing all the same mistakes made all over again... (dreadful database design, over-engineering, under-engineering, 'hacking' to meet a time schedule, lack of client involvement, premature optimisation, optimising without metrics). Seeing the whole arena move in what seems like rather pointless directions - e.g. making web apps act like WinForms apps (except slower) by dint of much complex autogenerated code, seeing the database side engulfed by new tools with their own syntax and learning curve - none of which is necessary if you knwo the SQL and a programming language, seeing the proliferation of a kind of thinking that wants to do everything by ever-more config files - rather than the tool actually designed for the job (i.e. a standard programming language that everyone can follow). Knowing that going for architect only distances you so fast from the tech that you'll be out of touch even faster - and even less useful. Knowing that *WE* made it this way - we wanted a pure mertiocracy, we (when we were young) wanted a field where age and experience didn't matter so much as quickness and cleverness. Being just tired of it all.

For commercial products, there's a CRM product called Ascent (V.2) which is written in .Net. I used to work somewhere that had it [a major international EMC reseller], writing custom additions. There are LOTS of .Net backed websites/apps. (I note that this page itself has an ."aspx" extension...) There is plenty of C#/.Net work going on in UK-based Investment banking, Insurance etc. I also worked on a 2nd generation version of commercial Photo Kiosk software (used widely in US and UK, you know where you stick your camera card in and get prints/books/mugs/Tshirts/teddies) that was entirely .Net. Dunno if it ever got released as the company got taken over just about as it it was finished.