My 2015 vintage Lenovo has battery management so I keep charge at around 55%. click of a button and it will charge full if you know travel is imminent. My new Dell work laptop also has Battery management. I have it also set to keep battery at 50% since it is plugged in and powered on 24/7 99% of the time. If I am not traveling, I will cycle the battery down to about 20% and then charge it back up and run it back to 50% again maybe once every 6-8 weeks.

When the ads get on my nerves or I am watching a long video and they decide to hit me with a chain of them every 2 minutes. I just connect to vpn from a country where ads are banned and enjoy my content in peace. Maybe they will eventually catch on, but until then, it works well.

Haha spoken as if OP has the power to make the decision between "Do it right" and "Do it right now". OP says VB6 dev is retiring. Therefore, there is a clock on the project and handoff. I suspect the decision makers will be more likely to take the straightest path, not necessarily the wisest path. I guess if I were involved, I would want it to be clear on whether this is purely a lift and shift migration project or a modernization project.

I love to see another cohort participating in such crimes against humanity.:laugh: This reminds me of about 10 years ago when I cut my teeth with PS at a bank I worked at. I had ended up building a whole Console app AutoUtils.exe in VB.NET for handling day to day maintenance on the dev and QA environments as well as some security auditing functions via Batch files. After the bare metal server migrations to VMs in a blade rack a few months later, IT Jesus decided suddenly PS was king and the only accepted tool for scripting. I left there before I got the chance to rewrite the AutoUtils as PS scripts. But the ability to consume .net appcode directly in PS was something I was excited to leverage. At my last job, our senior started establishing devops practices and the number of servers between our 2 datacenters was significant. He started using PS with C# helpers for handling specific build workflows between environments and datacenters. Last time I talked to him, he uses it at his new job unraveling several years of user induced "point and click" workflows that had no need being manual. Told me he has written several C# helpers. No shame in using what works for your use case.

MS has link to free Win11 VM images so you can "try" win11 and current dev tools. Its Win11 Enterprise edition.. The trial images I believe are still available and activated for another couple weeks. The had extended the trial period to May. Actually had a project that used some legacy OLE functionality that required the old Paint which we found was wacky 10 to 11 upgrades and didnt work at all with clean install of 11. That trial image saved us a ton of time testing as well as establish that our dev team was not ready to make the switch just yet.

I dabbled in OneNote when it first came out and never quite found my groove with it. For some reason text files and word docs with screenshots pasted in and saving in folders was just more "natural" for my cluttered mind. At work, early in my dev career, a couple of dev projects were "documented" in a notebook but it wasn't until about 7-8 years ago that something just clicked. A work project turned into a personal project management and meeting notes tool.. then a digital whiteboard (as i ended up losing my whiteboard at my cubicle.) Then a cheatsheet repository for all devops functions of a specific product I was lead dev on.. Then it bled into my personal life.. Todo lists, shopping lists, travel notes and planning, hobby stuff, even became a personal blog like journal for an adventure I took. I jumped on the bandwagon with EverNote for a year or so back before the pandemic and it just didnt click the same for me as OneNote.. So I migrated the notes over and have my OneNote notebooks all saved onto OneDrive so I can freely access them on any device. Still a full representation of my cluttered mind.. But at least I evolved a little from files in folders on a USB drive. Which I still do sometimes.

As a longtime VB developer.. It always makes me smile just a little to watch C# language evolve and become a little more "wordy" with each new version. Having spent my first .NET developer years in a "C# is superior to VB in every way because ......" environment, It warms the heart to see old concepts, syntax, and patterns once viewed as inferior years later turn into evolutionary improvement. I applaud the change as I can see cases where that could codebases that are extremely data heavy read a little easier. For anyone but the purists anyway. If I were converting legacy VB code to C# "IsNot" to "Is Not" would feel more natural to me.

My initial 30 days of use opinion is simply. No it is not yet "worth" upgrading to from Win10. Sanding down corners, and feeding the insatiable thirst to jigger with the start menu EVERY major update is tiring. While I don't use it alot, the regression to not be able to move the taskbar from its bottom position is a miss for me. Even with the reg hacks its barely usable. That allegedly will be "fixed" though. The context menu change was a bit jarring especially in cases where there are sub menus for things.. But I can at least acknowledge it as an attempt to evolve usability and not be purely change for sake of change. Considering I currently only have 1 PC that actually meets MS requirements to upgrade, I am certainly not tripping overmyself to make the full conversion. It works fine on my surface pro 7 for the workloads I give it. I will stay on Win10 for everything else until 11 falls on my lap or until there is some compelling reason to switch.

I am glad to see this question asked as over the last 2 or 3 years, I have started to think about my career. I took a job 9 years ago with the idea that I would progress to a mid level dev, work up to senior role, maybe get into a team lead role. The key was I was not going to be content doing the same thing year 1 as I was year 10. Well I ended up not progressing at my place of employment. I have fixed that problem. But even with greener pastures, I still just don't get that rush and feel writing code fulltime will get me to retirement. My pursuit continues on finding that balance. I feel like there is a niche for analysts and management with the tech background in the weeds of the products and teams one works. I feel could be more valuable than some textbook read PMP or some web certified professional thats efficient at buzzword bingo.

Reminds me of this... xkcd: Automation[^]

This is my life. A tale of two worlds at continuous war. I started out in networking, admin and application support.. Opportunities arose to learn and contribute to the applications.. The development became a lucrative career path. 17+ years later I find myself looking for "the last program" and it always seems to be n+1. lol

"Would you like to play a game?" lol. That actually sounds really cool and a testament to the value of "legacy" desktop development.

Actually I had a VB6 app still out in the wild up until about a year ago (sorta a victim to covid).. lol. But I didn't consider it active dev since I havent touched the code in probably close to 3 years. The remaining active projects are VB.NET. Until office politics kills them anyway. I embrace being the red headed stepchild amongst my C, Java, and JS peers and all their new fangled interwebz and mobile stack. They try to get a rise out of me but I remind them the majority of their tools are still desktop apps. So I can't be that obsolete yet.

Not only do I still write desktop apps, I have several still in production that are in VB as well.

This generations spin on DLL hell. It's not so bad when you have one or 2 packages that stand on their own. But when the packages have dependencies on other packages which depend on other packages. And one package want v2.0 and another wants v2.2, it becomes a kluge. TFS seems to choke on pulling solutions and ACTUALLY recognize package dependency. Or do recognize and tell me packages are installed but throws errors of missing references no matter how often I refresh or clean/build, etc. Often have to delete the reference and readd. Local nuget seems to have helped some.. Until a genius updates a package (or packages) and decides it should have all the latest and greatest dependent packages without thinking about downstream impact and ends up breaking stuff. Thats more of an internal problem but still an example of how wrong things can go in a nuget world. Our team has lovingly referred to it as NO-GET.

I have.. a latte

You assume that there are infact hard copy "rules" to follow in the first place.. Chances are if there is even a "lone ranger" situation at all, there are merely arbitrary best practices and no actual rules being enforced. I can see both sides to this quandry. I am neck deep in being the "lone ranger" in a project (now 8 years). I have found the opposite problem. It was deemed accepted and almost preferred that it be only a resource suck for a single team member up until recently. So much time spent and with new leadership, I have been in the old "what is it you do here" chair. That has been disheartening. Now suddenly there a bunch of new "rules", expectations, documentation, support demands, and a whole "be a team player" narrative placed on me. Lots of productivity crushing "process", but still no Tonto. The one person army for the project may or may not have been of their own doing and is more a failure of project/product management and process. They may have gotten into some bad habits and now have become accustomed to being in their own sandbox. I sense of ownership maybe. To suddenly have to let others in to that sandbox, especially in a critical manner, can be perceived as hostile. But again, thats on management.

"...What do you expect when even their own president hardly knows any other country than Mexico, Russia and China. One of them being more or less OK, the other two ones obvious enemies." And which one that is OK is subject to change (and does) at any time and only with notice from Twitter. Lol I have found parts of europe like Belgium, Netherlands, even Denmark sometimes use English better than many Americans. Though I suppose that is more due to the proximity to the UK than any US influence.

Here here!! While I generally agree VS is a top tier IDE. I want a moment on the soapbox.. How about bring back temporary projects. I got very spoiled with that feature and then they dropped it in vs2019. They claimed it was dropped because useage metrics deemed no one used it.. yet it immediately got feedback. I called out what usage metrics they could have possibly gotten to make this determination (unless VS phones home your every click??). What probably happened is temp projects doesnt fit the way they implemented the new start screen, which I find actually a bit clunky to spin up new projects than the old way. It was handy to spin up a console app, tinker with a snippet of code, and discard. No neee to save to a Temp folder and remember to clear it out. For that I still open VS2017 instances. I'll step off the soapbox now before I go on about their recent trend extensions.

Used Gliffy once or twice. Visio a few times when available. But I always come back to PowerPoint. I don't usually diagram anything too crazy. I will be honest i have used PowerPoint for everyhing from mockups, to rough floorplanning and blueprinting. So I'm a little bias. Maybe if I had any real skills at diagrams I would use more appropriate tools.