I'm going to assume there is a stable user base using the existing application, and although it's tempting to redesign from scratch, it can impact existing users negatively. so keep the existing product in maintenance mode, start a sub team or at least one person to start mapping functionality and building it in a newer .NET 6 using something like server side blazer; it will be a close relative to Web forms to migrate logic over. next step would be to modernize the layouts, if not already there. it's a slow process. my reasoning for this is you can launch the new version and have (almost) no difference to the "feel" of the application. once you know that the new platform is stable and works identical or better than the original version now you can start implementing newer layouts, letting the users grow with your changes. worse case when testing out the new version would be slipping the old one back in place if something major needs fixed.

if you are looking for portability without having to install software on the host machine and do not need to share the DB with another process, go with SQLite. it works fantastic, most languages have support baked in, and you can still pass structured queries. last I read I think there is a 4TB limit. if the *.mdb gives you something more that SQLite doesn't have, choose that. to be honest I haven't touched an Access db from code in a couple decades, so I'm not all sure what it offers currently. if you are not worried about portability use SQL express, or a no-SQL DB for document storage. both are good, it all depends on what you plan to do with the data.

same here. we don't believe the hype. beyond a few scripting examples, I haven't seen much use of it.

I really miss working in IOT, I haven't touched any of my home projects in a couple years now, no longer work at somewhere that has a use for IOT. I'm afraid some of my skill set is fading. I work for a medium sized community college building software for them now, pay is good, benefits are excellent, the retirement package is over the top, and the work is absolutely boring. I feel like embedded work is much more interesting: pore over the datasheets, choose the correct chips for the job, master you're C skills, and enjoy the pain of getting an inert object to light up and do something. now with web development :( you spend most of the time looking up what the frameworks do as they change every year, what framework, what platform. you can never master this crap, it changes too quickly.

Yes, but I know of a lot of people who skipped ME, Vista, W8. maybe a bunch of people will skip W11 and just wait for the next one. I wouldn't mind upgrading, but I loath the new Mac clone of a start menu. everything else seems pretty cool and useful.

how about some of the PC104 rugged units, they should last quite a long time, many of them support windows 10

I love OneNote for dumping notes in. if you have the full office I would suggest adding on NoteHighlight it allows you to insert formatted and colored code in quite a few programming languages. also using it to checkoff tasks or reminders, cheat sheets, locations of things on the servers.... my only issue is going back one in a while and cleaning up my notes. If I ever leave this place, they are going to keep the OneNote backups safe.

I pretty much said the same. there is not much room for error in industrial automation. keeping the code clean without anything that can be ambiguous is always a solid direction. like you know, it's almost impossible to simulate all the analog and digital signals that happen in the real world. writing unit tests for that would dwarf the original code :laugh: I do miss working in industrial automation, I liked the challenges that came from it. just didn't like the companies or people I worked with there, too many hours away from home, too little pay, and too much stress being the sole dev to do it all.

I've always been a single dev, once or twice working with another dev at jobs. I've never bothered with Unit Testing (when it started to become popular), because of the nature of the embedded or control software made it almost impossible to simulate real world situations. the code had to be correct also because of the litigation that could happen if something is even a little off and you destroy product. Although I'm not building that stuff as much anymore, I still go by my old habits of building code and test running it early as possible. some more complex things will get a temporary project to test the code and once I'm happy I'll integrate it into the main project. I rarely have bug issues and still have software out there running since 2001-ish. this is my first job using SQL that I've never needed before in my previous jobs, but I still find when making stored procedures or complex views that I follow my normal build, test, and expand until the final SPROC is completed. It's nice because it's always a testable 'unit' to verify results separate from the software logic. this place I'm working for now had so much embedded inline SQL in the legacy code, so It's almost impossible to test out separately from the program logic, so it's all getting replaced slowly. tldr; I'm old and stubborn, and my process has been working great for me forever, I see no need to use Unit Testing at this point.

I know I can replace the start menu with 3rd party software, but I just can't get over the new start menu, I can't stand the way it looks or operates, so I'm not upgrading. 11 feels like windows 8 or Vista, easy to skip over

during lunches I like to play minecraft. when I have spare time on the weekends I like to play dying light

the Dyson Sphere episode, that was one of my favs

I was just reading up on the UltraRam from yesterdays news letter UltraRAM Breakthrough Brings New Memory and Storage Tech to Silicon | Tom's Hardware[^] It sounds awesome for computers in general, but it would have a huge impact on embedded applications. feel free to chime in honey the codewitch. to have a small embedded device that does not have to maintain power to RAM while waiting for a trigger would be a huge power savings for the embedded CPU. and if the device looses power all together, you wouldn't have to worry about writing data to flash or EEPROM, before loss. even to just have a 128K of it on an embedded CPU would be a huge step forward. imagine having a device that someone powers up in 999 years after being dug up from some old found landfill and having it start working, is the stuff of sci-fi books. (I would say boot up, but if everything is still in memory, not much booting needs to happen)

I was going to say more like SQL

it's been a couple years since I last wrote a SPI -> display setup, but if I'm remembering correct there is a minimum time threshold for the slave device to register the tick. Usually the pdf for the display chip should have the min and max values. But I'm likely saying something you already know. have you tried putting in some empty wait commands between processing to slow it down a few cycles and see if the displays not working correctly start working again? if they do, can you make a make a couple variables when initializing the code like: _DSP_FAST =0, _DSP_MED = 16, _DSP_SLOW = 32 and tie those into wait loops? whether to release it or not question: I wouldn't unless there is a clear advantage for your optimized code like a solid 10% gain (or more) in clock ticks that can be shed over to other processing tasks, but then you should have a disclaimer for what displays work good, and what ones you know don't. gosh I miss working on that stuff. good luck on what ever direction you are going. :)

I'm hoping it not a long term trend, or the debugging tools have to get better. I can put a break on a function and inspect the variables as I step through the code, it gets a little trickier on expression bodies especially when working with large collections or arrays :( I like the cleanliness of expression bodies, but at the same time sub expressions do tend to muddy up the readability. Someone correct me if I'm mistaken, but once the code is compiled a expression body just gets translated into a function (like) code structure which is just a jump to address and then return as seen by the processer. I'll admit I've not looked into what happens too much under the hood with expression bodies in dotnet.

I'm not old, but at the age of 45 in tech terms I'm ancient. my decades in development have helped keep the door open for new opportunities, but I think I've found a nice spot writing code for a local community college. the work load is just about right, still try to push myself to learn something new all the time, but damn some of the new platforms are so much waisted processing power for little gain, and it really hurts to see such inefficient layers of code.

short: yes Long: abstraction for the sake of patterns is a waste when it's not needed. I knew someone who abstracted everything and basically made a soup of interfaces for a very simple implementation, the abstraction was not used in a beneficial way, and caused way more headaches just trying to troubleshoot. the KISS ideology is good, but I like the "Keep it as simple as possible"; if you know multiple things will inherit or implement code, build for that. if not, keep the code as direct and simple as possible, you can always refactor later.

because the start menu looks way to close to apple crap, I'm holding off until new options are available. If I have too, then I'll buy stardoc and replace the start menu.

I'm fairly dyslexic, gets much worse when I'm tired or too stressed. especially verbal to writing or reading out loud, it all gets jumbled up. sequences of more than 4 numbers I can't remember. As a result, I don't trust my memory. So like you I don't like to spread my code all over the place, but I will still breakdown issues into smaller chucks, usually in the same file, so it's just a scrolling issue. if it's across multiple files then splitting the screen is an absolute must. Since I don't have confidence in what was written, I test early and often whenever I can. but that also means I have way less issues in production than a lot of my peers. I also document my code, and when the language supports it add signature docs to each function, so when typing out code to connect to other code, the IDE will help me remember what params to pass or other relevant information. My biggest issues are usually switching between languages and remembering how to do something when two different languages do things similar, but not quite. so C, C#, Java, JavaScript, Rust, D, kind of blur together event though not the same. Had the same issues with ADA, Basic, and SQL oddly enough.