This is true, although you'd also get a visible (semi-)immediate null reference exception when you try to use anything from the object. Plus, I personally use "as" so often that either: a) I remember to test it -- equally as well as I'd remember to use a try/catch in the other scenario, or b) when I forget/get a null reference, I remember to include failed casting as the possible culprit when debugging. I think we agree that it boils down to a "personally, I ..." kind of thing. :)

www.oooshola.com

viaducting wrote:

No, because the two are not equivalent (see other posts below).

Exactly. I believe "as" returns null if the attempt to cast was unsuccessful, while casting will produce an exception. So, for testing if the cast was successful or not: With casting, you'd need a try/catch block. But with "as" you could just test the result if it's null or not, with an if statement. (<-- arguably less code/more readable).

www.oooshola.com

I think that you should stick with what you have the most experience with (i.e. asp.net). Although in the real world you sometimes don't have an option, it's always ill-advised to have your first ever project in a new platform actually *be* the production app. I think you should take advantage of the fact you indeed have the option. Plus, I'd assume updating your new solution would be easier in asp.net, since all you'd need is FTP and bam, you can instantly update the app for all who access it. Good luck!

www.oooshola.com

Hello, This is a very interesting question that if you think about it, really applies to any sector of work. I would say to go about it the same general way you would hire an electrician, choose a doctor, select a web hosting company, etc. There is a set of research steps involved (that you seem to have already gone through), but there is the moment that you must simply take an educated "plunge" (for lack of a better word) and make your decision. You seem very cautious and diligent, so perhaps you have a small personal project, or something similar, that you can "try out" on a company or individual you like on the surface? As a web developer and designer myself, I know how valuable and telling the first real impression can be. Then you can begin to push forward with your larger client projects, or instead choose another company/individual if you didn't like the initial trial results. There are also other signs you might look for in a web company that you can trust, such as: free consultations, number of included revisions, etc. These are costless pieces of information that you can use in the weeding process. :-D

Web. Print. Fine Art. oooshola.com

Wrong, that would be "handiblecter".

www.oooshola.com

Interesting take--except for the small details of stuff like 1)emotion/irrationality and 2)ability to create new ideas.

www.oooshola.com

Unless all you watch are movies, you should think of a projector as a secondary viewing device to your tv. If you don't already have a tv that you're satisfied with right now, get the tv. Otherwise, you'll be needing to close your blinds/curtains every time you watch a show, in order to prevent a washed-out projection from a projector. This is besides the bulb cost/fan noise/etc. downsides that others have mentioned.

www.oooshola.com

People think IE is a bloated mess with confusing and hard to find settings. I think that's harsh and uncalled for. Hard to find settings? No not really--until you begin to use another browser like Firefox; then you see the relative ease you were missing out on. Bloated mess? Not at all. There aren't enough features for it to be bloated. IE is just now (with version 8) catching up to features that have already been in Firefox 3 and other browsers for a while now. I'll give examples: - Smart Address Bar - "Find on Page" - Enhanced Tabbed Browsing - Inprivate - Automatic crash recovery Furthermore, it seems that I still can't order my icons (like I used to be able to do in IE6). However the real problem developers have had with IE is its quirkiness in rendering (I'm still amazed at how PNGs didn't get full support until IE7). However IE8 is a promising segue to browsing standards. There will be unfortunate but necessary "growing pains" in which some developers will need to change their conditional code.

www.oooshola.com

http://www.ultraproducts.com/product_details.php?cPath=52&pPath=154&productID=448[^] I have 2 20in. monitors, a pretty decent Xeon desktop, and an external hard drive all plugged into that beast up there. During a tornado outage, I was able to work for 1 hour extra (could probably have been more, but I finished what I was doing). I always feel like I pay too much for these things right after I buy them, but boy that notion goes right out the window as soon as there's an outage!

www.oooshola.com

Ok, so I gather the answer to my questions are all "no"? First and foremost I'm not telling you what the 1 way to program is. I'm in fact stating the opposite, by respecting your *style* of coding, as I stated already in my first post. And by style, I'm referring to your abstinence from ORMs, not your top-down approach (i.e. top-down is not just a style). I agree with the end-user oriented and top-down approaches, and practice it myself (in fact I'm a graphic designer as well--the first thing I do when building a web app for instance, is to actually fire up Photoshop--not VS--and sit with the client). So I agree that starting with data is a very bad idea. However, I completely disagree that ORMs are mutually exclusive with the top-down approach. Correct me if I misunderstand you, but it seems that you think that 2 apps that have the same exact well-designed front end cannot have different data layers with 1 being written from scratch, and 1 using an ORM. The objects you get from ORMs are simply your data access layer. The business layer that is written by ourselves creates the level of abstraction in which the UI can be completely ignorant of how the data layer works--whether the data layer was from scratch or not. So here's the difference. When it *is* finally time to write the data layer, some people prefer to write it completely from scratch, some prefer incorporating an ORM. It depends on what your comfortable with, not if you're "an idiot" or not. An idiot will write bad code from scratch, or with an ORM, and so the contrapositive is true as well. This is why I say these particular things are really style--which each craftsmen uniquely has. My own opinion is that when an ORM is used correctly, I find myself completing/expanding the data layer faster. This speed in completing and updating the project in turn actually does directly benefit the end-user.

www.flixgadget.com

Just a couple of side questions John C, yet pertinent. Out of curiosity, have you used the EF before to know what it's capable of? You know about ESQL? Perhaps most importantly, do you know that one of its flagship differences between itself and Linq to Sql is that it doesn't have to be a 1-to-1 relationship between the code and the database schema? Or even for that matter, do you know how many enterprise projects were created with a foundation of the likes of Hibernate or NHibernate? Some things are obviously wrong (nsquared sorting) and some things are obviously right (coding caching for your data access). But everybody has their own styles of coding. To say that code-generation is crappy or wrong without tweaking it so much that it was pointless in generating it in the first place, is indeed painting with quite a wide brush.

www.flixgadget.com

Yeah, sorry about that man. Apparently a lot of people are in your shoes. By the way though, you probably already figured it out, but the equivalent of Single/SingleOrDefault is First/FirstOrDefault in EF. I'm not sure why they did that...One very cool difference with LtoS is that the EF has an "update from database" wizard that LtoS didn't have. With LtoS you would have had to re-drag and drop everything you wanted all over again. On the other hand, you can right-click within the EF designer UI and click on "update model from database". So I know that is at least 1 thing that sqlmetal (or LtoS as a whole for that matter) cannot do.

www.flixgadget.com

You may want to look into using the Entity Framework and Linq to Entities before investing time and energy to Linq to Sql. Microsoft basically said that they're not going to invest more energy in advancing it, and the Entity Framework should be what we use instead. Fortunately, the EF can be dragged and dropped VERY similar to how Rocky explained Linq to Sql works. http://blogs.msdn.com/adonet/archive/2008/10/29/update-on-linq-to-sql-and-linq-to-entities-roadmap.aspx[^]

www.flixgadget.com

The design and backend of a website/blog for women entrepreneurs...Check it out if you like www.msceoshow.com It looks like TCP members might be slightly lopsided in the gender area :) But much of the site's info is quite neutral.

www.flixgadget.com

You should not have to factor hosting cost differences between 2.0 and 3.5. At this stage in time, 3.5 is so widely adopted by hosting companies that if they still only provide 2.0, then they suck :) Plus, since the framework is free and all 2.0 programs/websites work seamlessly on a 3.5 framework, there won't be any cost differences with hosts, and there won't be any compatibility problems (you might need to change a couple of things in web.config if targeting a 2.0 app to the 3.5 framework, but VS2008 does this for you automatically). Additionally, I don't think you'll be able to find a reputable host anyway that does not allow you to target 1.1, 2.0, and 3.5 all within the same Windows hosting plan. In general, simply using 3.5 shouldn't cost you anything except for the cost of VS2008 (if you buy the full version instead of express). Also, I'm interested in why people say that extension methods are a bad idea? I've used them successfully before, but maybe I'm missing some sort of caveat? Thanks!

www.flixgadget.com

If ratings are essentially what you priortize, then your decision all depends on how useful each specific article is. I think that coders first and foremost rate an article based on its usefulness...if they finish reading it, of course--which is highly probable. So don't get me wrong, ratings are extremely important, since they basically denote how much and how many people you helped. My point is that the perceived usefulness (and therefore the article rating) is much more important than article length. Don't let conciseness get in the way of sharing valuable information to others :)

www.flixgadget.com

Like someone else said, it boils down to what language/technology you want to use. If you already know C# or VB.NET, you might be geared toward using the Windows, IIS, and ASP.NET trio--with SQL Server as your database. If you prefer to go the open source-esque route, then you might want to go with the Linux, Apache, and PHP trio (or rather more commonly referred to as LAMP--Linux, Apache, MySql database, and PHP). Those are the 2 most commonly used platforms, as evidenced by pretty much every hosting company's packages. You're able to however mix and mach a little--i.e. run PHP on IIS and even ASP.NET on a Linux box (using Mono I believe) but you're better off using the more common approaches explained, since they were kind of built to fit easily with each other. Popularity: I will say that the LAMP platform is more widespread because of 2 main reasons--it came before ASP.NET, and it's cheaper for hosters because of the open source software. Reliability: This totally depends on how well the coder writes the code. It's tremendously easy to write bad code in both.

www.flixgadget.com

6 years ago at my high school they were teaching C++ as the first language, and I very liked it. However, I became sick the day that my teacher taught OOP, and was somewhat lost for a while when I came back to school. I think my university had it right--which taught Java. It is more straight forward and less ambiguous than how C++ can be, and it (painlessly?) instills the following good programming practices that are seen in many languages: -straight forward OOP (no extra .h header files reqired, like in C++, etc) -reference vs. value -case sensitivity awareness (i.e. VB can sometimes mislead the beginner in when this matters) -great FREE IDEs out there (netbeans, eclipse) ...many more

woohoo for blender! I'm surprised to see another blender enthusiast out here in the code project, even though it's arguably now one of the greatest 3d programs out there (already the greatest 3d open source one). I've used python briefly in blender, and it is "interesting". Anyway, the bottom line is that python--like any other non-"pervasive" language--definitely has its uses. your chances of getting a job by being an expert solely on python are much less than that of VB.NET, C#, C++, Java, etc. This is more or less because existing systems use these more supported/pervasive languages.