Well glad to hear it worked out well for you anyway. I like to think I'm not petty enough to not hire someone for proving me wrong, but we are only human. :)

Nice :) did you get the Job or not? if not I would urge you to consider that winning can sometimes be loosing

I cannot see why it would be hard to implement... Essentially most multi-tab browsers now have a separate process for each tab, but they must have some way of telling which tab is active in order for it to display in a raised state. So it is not at all impossible, they cannot even state the memory requirements would be too high, as storing a url as compared with storing all the garbage that most webpages contain is like adding a grain of sand to a mountain. All they need to do once they have the active tab is extrapolate the url and add it to a tab-group. Far more worrying for me is the implementation of having 10+ tabs open at one time in Windows 8. It is a nightmare to navigate through without using [OS]/[ALT]+[TAB] (I believe my win8 does not allow [WIN]+[TAB], but [ALT]+[TAB] works great... theyFail!)

I hope you have a lot of fun, but more importantly I hope you learn a lot! I have gone through several editions of the book compiling various combinations and following the extra guides on security (BLFS) etc. Try to change some of the build options once you are confident, because as much as people say you can't the guy from slackware makes all changes himself (or he did at one point).

Hey it sounds like she's onto something, let's pin all of our mission critical data to the table and give it a wild night it won't forget! Or you could go to mongoDB. MongoDB is web-scale mongo db can pipe all your data to /dev/null to ensure lightning fast performance. Just a question for said girl, if I try to read too many files from a slow, mechanical hard-drive and I cause thrashing, am I DDOS'ing my HD ;P I want to put the fun back into fundamentalism!

That is an amazing story! hahahaha that is so funny, I take it they did not get the Job?

For me it is a tick-list * Do they have code samples * Do they have / can they send me examples of "Hobby" projects (often these are more technically proficient than client projects, or at least they will / should always be passionate about them) * Do they have examples of finished work (even if they were part of a team) * If they have worked in a team, what were their responsibilities (avoid floaters that "do a bit of everything") * Do they understand / could they quickly adopt the coding style I need them to * What experience do they have (years for language(s) & project size, it's no good hiring a 10-year PHP veteran to build you an OS) * Are their any specialties they posses (relating to programming) * Are they willing to learn * Are they a roll their-own (Can they name some popular libraries) * Are they dependent on a library (Likewise they should be able to code without putting XYZ dependency into every project, the term wordpress or drupal developer really incenses me!) * What do the existing group think of them * What are their goal and aspirations (again you need to be careful as some just want to make senior dev quickly and will meander through many businesses to do so) Pitfalls I have experienced * Jack of all trades (Recently I sat with a dev that told me his experience was in hardware design, software design, programming for any device and that he was better known in Japan than UK. Needless to say he fell down upon scrutiny of any one area by being vague and general or jargon-throwing, some words that did not even belong together) * Academically perfect, Business disaster (This basically relates to anyone that would suggest re-visiting client code (regardless of who wrote it) and perform months of work adjusting the architecture (NOTE: without functional reason) of code so that it better fit a text-book description or what they learned in college. If someone does this, but they seem an otherwise good candidate, just ask them for some research before making changes and double check with clients (NOTE: not benchmarks alone but solid, business focused research with a case study) ) I think that should cover it :)

It was both a reply to you and the OP, most was for the OP but the first bit was for you "Clearly what is meant is that the application that communicates uses WCF (but an existing driver probably exists to do all the low-level bits) So the application can use the higher-level functionality provided by the drivers and windows to open sockets or rawIO connections." This was a reply to your comment "okay, clear. Thought you are saying embedded system is communicating with a windows box via WCF!!!" Which was also a reply (not to the OP) :-\

Maybe its worth asking him if he has a file with all of the global functions "everything needs to use" lol, I started with VB6 and occasionally play around in .NET, there not poor languages, they have event-driven and best of OOP and alot of people wanting to quickly prototype things often write them in VB(.NET or 6). While I do syntactically prefer C-style programming (not low level just curly braces, strong typing, familiar type names), but recently I have begun playing in VB.NET again as I have been writing some BASIC code for my rPi and wanting to quickly get to grips with windows8

Clearly what is meant is that the application that communicates uses WCF (but an existing driver probably exists to do all the low-level bits) So the application can use the higher-level functionality provided by the drivers and windows to open sockets or rawIO connections. On the Project itself, it seems to me (Sorry if this offends) that the design of the system (not application) is flawed. It's like using a sledgehammer to whack in nails, and while it will work it may be a little over-engineered. Truely the POS equipment / software for scanners should interface to the DB already (how it gets it's prices anyway) and you could then just add-in some SQL triggers to decrement "instock" (or similar) of item. Raising a purchase ledger (should be done automatically through stock system), can then be stored online, but it should only ever be stock, prices and promo's that are read by online anyway... Just my two-cents, but might have saved you a lot of headache. Difficult projects for me are all about difficult clients, they either have other contractors in poking about what you've done breaking things, or they change their mind about what they want (both result in a fresh bill)