Personally I'm happy coding in either as long as I'm being paid but for me....... 1. I find it much easier to create bugs in VB that I can't so easily make in C# 2. If I need to 'borrow' some code courtesy of Google/ go through an MVC tutorial etc (why re-invent the wheel ?) then what I find is more likely to be in C#. Re-writing it in VB isn't that hard but it does slow things down. 3. A lot of the tools available to help you write better code more quickly only seem to work fully with C# (throw them a bit of VB and it might work but you won't get all the features you had if it was C#). Yes I know I arguably shouldn't need any of these at all but the end result is I'm confident I can produce better bug resistant code more quickly in C# than I can in VB and that's what I'm getting paid for. Mostly I don't get a choice of language (existing VB projects and manager preference if there's a chance he'll have to work on it) but when I do it's C# and the projects always seems to go better.

And every year I miss it until someone reminds me the day after :-( Oh well, there's always next year ....

Mark Nischalke wrote:

improvements to the IDE itself.

So being able to reliably crash the IDE and silently re-writing bits of a .aspx page and occsionally the .net code so that my app no longer works are a thing of the past ? Oh, and occasionally having to close and re-open VS to get the site to compile - I'll be rather glad to be rid of that one as well

Having been on the other side of the table recently I'd say 1. Don't let whatever else has happened that day affect you. I had one interviewer had torn my CV into pieces and thrown it in the bin before I arrived due to an argument with the recruitment company. Safe to assume he wasn't in a positive mood. Laid the pieces out in a sort of rough jigsaw for the interview. 2. Know exactly what the person is actually going to be doing. I left one interview with absolutely no idea what the job involved. Might have involved a computer of some sort. Interviewer had no idea whatsoever what the IT dept did. 3. Don't assume the candidate has been given all the facts especially if there is something that might put someone off applying. "What do you mean the company supplies the bulletproof vest? Oh OK, it's just in case they get past the armed mercenaries guarding the convoy on the way to work. No the recruitment agent failed to mention that part"

Thanks Hate to think my paranoia is unjustified. --------------- Remember - Just because you're paranoid doesn't mean you're wrong

Reckon I still have a way to go. Hit google once with Kung Fu and the hits you'll get back are "1 - 10 of about 34,900,000" Talk about outnumbered! You can't mess with that

Tried that, just sends me back to the same page with a new captcha to type in About time I got re-aquainted with Yahoo anyway

Any attempt to search for a query including asp.net on google.co.uk just tells me I'm an automated query - Please go away! Anybody know why ?

Surely you must therefore end up with places where you have a pile of nested functions where one function and a comment would have been better (less code, easier to follow and less maintainence). I've always felt you should write the best code to solve the problem (which is after all the actual goal) and comment as needed. The the best code to replace comments and documentation is probably not the best code for the problem you're addressing. Plus of course I am actually a human not a compiler. I read english faster than code.

Boy do I know that one! It could at least give a "It looks like you have a working program. Would you like me to add the bugs in for you ? Yes / No" popup

Not sure if this counts (and I'll ignore the marriage proposal printed across the middle of a 1000 page output nobody ever noticed) but when I was doing data analysis for a market research firm we had one job go horribly wrong and obviously going to miss its delivery deadline. The researcher in charge eventually psyched herself up to break the bad news to the client. His reply ? "Don't worry, we never read them anyway" His dept was tasked with getting reasearch done on the companys products so that's what he was doing.

Also I think it depends which test you do and your state of mind at the time. I did one to try to get into MENSA when I left university (good but didn't quite make it) One DIY test I got for Christmas (IQ went down significantly) One as part of a 5 hour interview for a company running IQ and personality tests (the interview was basically to just do every test they sold) where my IQ was better than ever The test just gives you an approximate score for your performance on that test on that day and (for me anyway) there are days when every problem is easy and days when just being concious is quite dongerous and probably a waste of time.

But there is in Profit Win Deliver Achieve Motivate Do none of those matter then ?

I'd go for a combination of 2 and 4 Specify tags you want and don't want then show everything that matches sorted by number of matched 'Want' tags minus number of matched "Don't want" tags That way you get items with all the want tags and no don't want tags at the top down to a single want tag and multiple don't want tags at the bottom and everything is there somewhere if you got it wrong

Computafreak wrote:

I've heard that the Microsoft qualifications are only just worth the paper they're printed on

To a large extent I'd agree with that as what the company needs is experience rather than paper but you also have to remember that you need to get past two categories of people to get a job. 1. Recruitment agencies/ HR departments who don't understand IT and don't really know what they're looking for so just look for something like an MS certificate on a CV because its an easy thing to filter by 2. The actualy developers/ IT managers who think the MS Cert is a good start but aren't that bothered and only care if you can actually do the job Unfortunately you have to make it past the first set before you get to talk to the second. I've spoken to a lot of recruiters (got made redundant last year) that had been given a list of things the person is supposed to know but have no understanding what any of them meant

2GB on my work machine with Vista which is nowhere near enough as I spend a lot of time waiting for the HD light to go out and things to start working again. 1.5 GB on my home machine with XP which is plenty even though I actually use it for more memory intensive programs.

I think it's more to do with client education and management sanity Did a project last year that realistically was around 4 weeks but was budgetted at 2 weeks becouse otherwise the client would have said its too expensive and they wouldn't get the job. Not suprisingly it all went horribly wrong and way over the 2 week budget largely due to inadequate testing resulting in a p*ssed off client and a finanicial mess due to the lack of budget. (Ironically I later found a postmortem document from the first wave of the project detailing exactly the same problems I hit and how the management would avoid them in future - mutter,mutter,grumble) Essentially their opinion was that quality was only acceptable if it gave a budget figure matching the clients expectations. Whereas I can see the need to have a cost the client wil accept, if you have to remove all testing and quality to acheive it then it's guaranteed to backfire on you and lose any chance of repeat business from that client. The majority of the projects were run this way, maybe not quite as bad but generally borderline between acceptable and untested/unplanned. They've since made 20% of the staff redundant (me included) and have some on a 4 day week. Personally I don't think they'll make it through the next couple of years. My current employer would rather argue that testing/ quality is something that it's in the clients best interests to pay a bit more for and is looking at recruiting extra staff. That's the choice really. Low quality = cheap quote that goes wrong and annoys the client. Higher quality = more expensive quote but with a decent chance of delivering what you promised and getting the client to consider you for their next project as well. If the client can't actually afford to pay for what they want then they need to be persuaded to either reduce their requirements or find someone cheap and accept that they will have problems with it. Comes back to the classic "You can have it cheap, quick or correct - pick two." Could waffle on for ages but I think that sums it up imho.

I just settle for calling them tmpStr tmpInt etc so I know. Tend not to use them at all unless I have to

Managed -12C last week which was cold enough thank you Don't want to think what -28 is like

My last 3 companies as an employee (in the UK) were charging between $110 and $140 an hour but for contract/freelance jobs between these I got around $45/ hour. $90 an hour was possible but that was for something like specialist banking experience with a current security check. I think that's history for a while though as there is such a surplus of ex-bank staff.