There's also the option to use Excel spreadsheet library for .NET Framework/Core - EPPlus Software[^] . There's a FAQ about licensing, depending on your requirements YMMV.

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

Back when I still did C++ stuff I used BoundsChecker, not sure if it's still around... was that the one you didn't remember?

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

You can generally fix VirtualBox issues with USB devices by one of two options: 1) Applying a fixed capture rule - you can tell VirtualBox to always capture a specific USB ID whenever it is physically connected. Helps especially with composite devices; 2) Changing the USB controller type from USB2 to USB3, or vice versa. Some devices perform better with the USB3 controller code, other with the USB2. YMMV. Other than that, I've been using VirtualBox for development tasks with Linux guests for quite a long time and it's mostly flawless now. Except drag and drop - that thing's a pain in the kernel. But you can easily live without it anyway.

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

I've been there many times as it seems I am one of those (un)lucky ones that actually enjoys untangling legacy code messes mysteries. What I usually do, after getting the hang of how to do a release with the current process, is: 1) Automating CI/CD - some things will be broken by refactorings, better be able to build/test/release quickly. Moreover, nowadays Git is a must; 2) Encapsulating all data access queries. Start with the writes, there are less of them and most of the time they can easily be ported to a proper data layer. Bonus points if you can start using a framework like EF6 that still runs on .net Framework - this may mean porting the SPs to code, but as you already mentioned that doubles as "putting them in source control". 3) Try to find the "bundles" of DB reads/writes and pack them into meaningful methods. This will be your business layer. May need to use TransactionScope to build some simple "unit of work" pattern here. Unless you need to use multiple databases this won't require using DTC so no major architectural problems here. 4) When all previous steps are completed, you have a UI shell around a business layer. That will need to be rewritten using your favorite technology. That's going to be less boring :)

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

Check whether Windows automatically installed a color profile for your monitor. I had this issue in the past, Windows found and activated a color profile that made everything yellowish. I had to download an updated one from the monitor manufacturer.

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

I see no reason to keep using .net Core 3.1. .Net 6 is LTS, can be used with the same good old syntax and has wider compatibility with other OSes. Also, they fixed quite a few bugs in the runtime libraries - but I guess one could use the most recent NuGets with older runtime versions. We have both .net webforms (4.8) apps and razor (6.0) apps sharing the same logic libraries, so in those we use multitargeting and reference NetStandard where possible. If only MS made EF6 compatible with .net standard 2.1 we could get rid of multitargeting altogether (EF Core is not a valid alternative for our use cases). We are also exploring how to replace Windows-specific dependencies with portable ones, mostly because from our preliminary tests running unit tests under Linux seems to be much faster. One thing I really cannot stand: the new main syntax (Should the console project template use top-level statements · Issue #27420 · dotnet/docs · GitHub[^]). Maybe I'm just getting old :)

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

Regarding the new context menu, MS added a new set of APIs to add items to the context menu (Extending the Context Menu and Share Dialog in Windows 11 - Windows Developer Blog[^]). Software developers have to adapt their code to the new APIs, but it's still possible to add items to the context menu and the old context menu is available as a fallback. Very few application were updated though, so the experience is suboptimal. My pet peeve is how often the new start menu crashes or lags. It's really getting to my nerves and always happens when I'm in a rush. Also: why the hell the Task manager is no longer accessible by right clicking the tray bar?

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

There's so many bugs in .net5 that it's not funny anymore. This is the last one we found that affects us, in something as basic as Directory.GetFiles: .Net Core Directory.GetFiles() operates webDav path · Issue #46723 · dotnet/runtime · GitHub[^]. Still untriaged after eight months. "Move fast, break things" has its place. The basic runtime for a lot of business applications in the world is not that place.

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

That tool unfortunately does not work on domain-managed machines. Because if you're the one managing updates and want to test eligibility before rollout, well, screw you. Amazing.

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

In addition to what others said, there are two different EF frameworks: * EF6 is fine for most business work. It enables fast coding for the 99% of your application, and it's easy enough to use raw ADO.net for the 1% that's performance-sensitive; * EF Core does not support Distributed Transactions. For most business applications this is a dealbreaker: it's very common to have to write on different databases, even if both are residing on the same server. EF6 will happily join them in a single transaction, EF Core won't. This is why we are still on the .net framework and skipping .net core...

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

Oh, dammit. There's a ton of old SharePoint related stuff still there that I use regularly. Why they couldn't migrate it to Github really beats me. Thanks for the warning!

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

Great, now I have a tentative timeframe for this one[^] I reported last December! .net core is a joke.

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

SOAP is fine. It's those dumb Java developers who build web services using all kind of Java-proprietary crap and shout "it works with Java clients" whenever someone points them to the specs they violate. I bet on the providing side you have a Java implementation. Sorry for adding my rant to yours, you triggered some very angry memories (I spent too many hours trying to fix other parties' mistakes).

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

I have the same need for personal documents and was looking for (but still haven't found) a similar solution. I have no time for experimenting right now, but I was going to try Alfresco[^], the free Community Edition should be enough. Let us know if you find something.

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

Hi all! I think I need some help in navigating the incredibly huge sea of web technologies that have appeared in the last years - it has been a while since I had the time to actually study newish frameworks and products. My job consists mostly of LoB applications, so until now I have found myself very comfortable with ASP.net Web Forms, WCF for AJAX interactions, a little bit of jQuery and ADO.net for database access - trying to keep it simple on the client side and have most of the work done on the server side. To achieve a 'modern' look I use the DevExpress Web Forms controls, and that's pretty much it. It feels, however, like I'm missing something. Everybody is talking about different approaches but they all seem like huge steps backwards to me. I can't honestly believe people are more productive this way. - ASP.net MVC? Yeah, just put some server side code alongside HTML. Back in my days we called that Classic ASP, and we hated it. Bonus hell points: video tutorials. - Data binding? Yeah, bind everything to a EF context, you get IQueryables, it's fast! Oh, you need to call an API? Tough luck... no data binding for you. Back to ObjectDataSources! - Bah! HTML5 and JS is all you need! Just use server side code for your APIs and learn to love Angular/KnockoutJS/SoupOfTheDay and AJAX calls! Yep, until the devil finds you in the 666th level of callback nesting. Oh, and no strict typing for you - I swear, you don't need it. Except when you need it, and it's in production, and you got screwed by something that in server side code would have never happened. More bonus hell points: huge javascript files with very little editor support. There MUST be some secret that all of the fancy web dev are hiding from me. Like, you know, a C# client side variant that gets compiled to JavaScript, has some DOM manipulation helpers and lets us avoid all of this mess. Bonus points if the examples' code works, because most of the other technologies' tutorial are either 'a) Dumbed down beyond the point of usefulness' or 'b) Outdated and just plain not working without the exact balance of dependencies and API keys and the right moon phase'. Is there a single tutorial that builds a real LoB application? I swear, I only need authentication, authorization, some attention to security and invoking web services. And some UI like forms, popup dialogs and toolbars. This is becoming a rant and I didn't really want that. I really think this is my fault. I just don't know where to start - and be productive with a simple but compl

In 15.8.1 they also broke support for the Italian keyboard layout (fixed in 15.8.2): you couldn't type closing curly braces for the entire month of August :-D I guess it's a good thing it happened in the month during which most of Italy is on vacation! :laugh:

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

Take a good look at the license terms; IIRC when DevExpress subscriptions expire you can keep using the last version available at the time of the expiration indefinitely :cool: Any time I looked at the alternatives, I found that the time spent in migrating and tweaking and fixing the open source equivalents was way more expensive than the DevExpress' retail price. Just my 2c

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

I'm currently using a 64gb Xiaomi MiA1. I would buy it again. My deal breaker is actually community support. I have perfectly good phones that I had to put in the electronics' closet because of obsolete OS versions. Pros: Android One and a good community support (i.e. custom ROMs when the devices will be unsupported by the manufacturer), cheap (less than 200 EUR), plenty of storage, high audio volume, dual sim/microsd support, headphone jack, bright screen of the right size, battery lasting a couple of days with normal usage (no social network apps). The IR transmitter is also cool (I use it for the projector and air conditioning at the office... coworkers tend to hide their remotes!). Cons: A bit subpar camera in low light, but there are software fixes for that (GCam thread on XDA). Some carriers with exotic 4G bands are not supported (worth a check before buying). As it's a Chinese phone, there is no manufacturer-provided warranty. USB-C connector so good charging cables are a bit on the expensive side. No user-replaceable battery (but still can be replaced by cheap repair shops). YMMV

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

At my previous job we were using BMC Control-M[^] and I found it a nice tool when in the right hands. We had lots of independent and interdependent pipelines and while I preferred a code-oriented approach, our sysadmins liked it a lot, especially for processes that spanned different architectures (file exchanges-.net code-remote queues-mainframe jobs-etc). Of course, sysadmins had no clue of what to do when processing jobs failed - except sending an automated warning email or restarting them to retry, but that was not really their fault...

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása

I don't think there's a real way to achieve portability on that, it strongly depends on the connector used. ODBC for example uses a positional syntax for parameters, ignores parameter names and uses the '?' char as a parameter placeholder. MS-Access, same thing. The MySQL provider IIRC can be configured both ways, but by default requires the '@' char (or maybe the reverse, it has been a few years since I last used it).

Luca The Price of Freedom is Eternal Vigilance. -- Wing Commander IV En Það Besta Sem Guð Hefur Skapað, Er Nýr Dagur. (But the best thing God has created, is a New Day.) -- Sigur Ròs - Viðrar vel til loftárása