Yes I know the Dock and Anchor options, but I can't do something like say the width of my text box is 80%.

In general, drag and drop, point and click is easier to use and approach. But.... with something like WPF, coordinates can be specified in terms of relative or absolute, and the organization of your containers and how they're setup is relevant too. It doesn't lend itself to a drag and drop approach. You can drag a window and drop it somewhere, and there are several ways the designer could format the code and it can't guess what you actually want. Only you know that. I've only used it a little bit, but I found the xaml editor more helpful. It reminded me of webforms, speaking of which, I never use the designer for web forms. I'm terrible with making pretty web forms, so I just create the elements I need, get it functional and pass it off to our web designer guy who does CSS against everything. He too, hates the designer because it gives you no idea at all what your page is going to actually look like. With Win32 API the designer makes sense, all coordinates are absolute so there is only 1 answer when it comes time to using the code. But even here, I put everything in table or flow layout panels and use those to control the layout logic. I never let anything just sit in a parent container, many of our applications are language translated and having things sit in absolute coordinates is a recipe for disaster. And given that designers are easier if you're lazy, I would think millenials would be all about making them a top priority. I doubt the lack of a designer is because of millenials.

So you've traced the evolution from machine language, to assembly, to high level languages. And you also note why the change occurred. Before I could answer your question, I have to ask why would programming move to a natural language to describe the program? Would natural language programming languages offer any benefit over a high level language? All I see is downsides.

I'm going to play devil's advocate and offer a counterpoint. Companies like Google and Facebook deal with such massive amounts of data that they had to approach solutions from a different perspective. They weren't teaching the methods they use to do things in schools and the information wasn't readily available. By open sourcing it, now the community of programmers around the world has access to it. This way when they hire someone to work on these complicated projects they can filter out candidates that never bothered to study what they make or how it works, and they don't have to train new engineers on these things. If they're going to give away their most prized solutions and algorithms, why not give all of it away. And yes they do suck people into being dependent on them for services and the cloud. But the alternative is everyone builds their own proprietary systems and their own cloud, or if they can't afford it they build nothing. Imagine instead of a handful of cloud providers you have hundreds of them, most of them closed to the public. Developers that change jobs now need to learn a completely new cloud environment instead of taking their skills with them. Companies like Microsoft and Amazon are actually lowering the barrier to entry to developers who need a cloud infrastructure, and yes they profit as a result, but it's not like they're gouging people or not providing a valuable service. All of the open source code serves as a model for how things can be done, you can take it as is and be dependent or use it as a starting point to understand how you might do it on your own, or better even.

The FCC attempt at expanding its authority under the guise of net neutrality is not necessary. It's just more expansion of government. Any real abuses in the marketplace can be handled with existing law. The FCC with its net neutrality provisions does not make it any more efficient at policing ISPs, it's decisions would have been made on as case by case basis as well.

What makes the fcc more capable of making such a decision than the justice department? And why do you think the fcc would always side with startups whereas the justice department wouldn't?

No, it's not fair to the startup. It's also a violation of antitrust laws; we don't need more laws to prevent a situation like this.

I've been following this more closely; you have the right idea. Companies should be allowed to run themselves as necessary, within limits. I don't think Joe User should feel they have the right to choke all of an ISP's bandwidth. So long as more than 1 ISP exists competition should serve to balance between providing user's needs and gouging them. Where only 1 ISP exists though, things could get ugly. But we do have laws on the books to deal with that and don't need another government body policing this.

IMO, if you can't handle strong typing, then you weren't completely sure what you were doing in the first place. Disabling strong typing, or using languages that don't feature it, are for the lazy in spirit and mind. Strong typing catches many simple, dumb little problems that can really bite you at runtime, when you may have already shipped the product. You can afford the compiler yelling at you for 5 seconds much more than you can afford a support call + an emergency patch.

Been using it for years, no problems here. Most times it doesn't consume too much CPU but occasionally it can get a little crazy, maybe doing background updates. I've only heard and read good things about it when people have intentionally put it through its paces and I have not heard of one virus that can specifically attack and disable MSE, which is more than I can say for Norton or McAfee.

Seems to me that once you cross that year 30 threshold, ladies lose interest in those jocks who are, most likely, flipping burgers for a living. In my experience, ladies find developers sexy. Cause we're successful and we have money. But also cause we're sexy. And not flipping burgers for a living.

Where possible, don't have nullable database fields. Empty strings or 0's are preferred. We often write classes in .Net to back database objects and having to deal with DBNull.Value is an extra pain. Usually we make the types Nullable which ends up poisoning the whole code base, or define them as Object which is stupid in a strongly typed language. Only where it makes sense, like if it's a foreign key and some objects don't have it, then make it NULL. "

I've also come across the situation where, rather than having a null value in a 'sold price' column, the value of zero represents an unsold item.

" Yeah, that's dumb. Use NULL for the special meaning of "no sale". NULL values are good for sentinel values. "

So, for example, if a customer address is unknown, the AddressId on the Customer table will have a value of (for example) zero - and the Address table will be pre-populated with a record with an Id of zero and (usually) empty string or zero values in the other columns.

" Also dumb, that is going to come back and bite you in the ass eventually. But I'm sure you already anticipate that :)

That was my choice too, Out of Memory. GDI throws this a lot and it's misleading. People with 8 gigs of ram scratch their heads wondering where it went wrong. GDI uses limited pools of memory for its stuff, and when it runs out it doesn't tell you which of these pools was exhausted. Even worse it usually lacks GDI resources to throw up a message box telling you it ran into a problem. I've dealt with this a lot in the past week.

I know, I don't disagree, but WHY is it so prevalent in this language that you find the most ignorant people? I know there are good VB.Net programmers, but I have never met one that wasn't proficient in at least one other language, either a close cousin like C# or something farther removed like C/C++ or Java. Real programmers know how to write code, not just how to use one language. I use VB all the time and there's a teeny tiny number of things it can't do compared to C#, none of them insurmountable. Most of them are just syntax related anyway. The ONLY reason I choose to use VB over C# is so that my coworkers can read and understand my code, or maintain it if I am out sick. The same VB code in C# might as well be a foreign language they can't speak. That's not true of all of them, but enough of them to mandate VB use. It's the lowest common denominator.

VB.Net is a .Net language. That means it's just as good as any other .Net language in terms of capabilities. That being said, there's something about the VB.Net programmer that sets them a class apart from someone who would pick C#. I find that VB programmers are the worst. They routinely don't understand the details of computer programming. When I hear of understandings like "Linq should be faster because it's fewer lines of code" I cringe. I know the correct response is to analyze the machine instructions produced from such statements, and to unroll all of the code and really look at the actual instructions sent to the processor. But years of having these discussions has taught me to just politely smile and reply "well, let me see if I can do better by writing all the code in C#". The response is always the same: skepticism at first, and then utter shock. They are always amazed that hundreds of lines of code in C# will plow through a complicated Linq query much faster. They don't understand things outside of their simplified VB.Net world. Sure, you can make the same mistake in C#, but the kicker is programmers who choose C# tend to know better. If your apps are simple and don't deal with large amounts of data, this is not a problem. But to turn a VB.Net programmer on a complicated task that is going to require some thinking about how to optimize it.... just say no. Find a real programmer who would say "I can do that in C#". That response alone is usually proof positive that the person knows how to do it.

That's downright scary. I insist that people use C# so they don't get into bad habits like that.

It wasn't funny at the time, but any VB.Net code that looked like this is hilarious in retrospect:

try

' lots of statements

catch
end try

Or even worse:

On Error Resume Next

' lots of statements

The developer's excuse? "My code doesn't crash!" Yeah. It also didn't work.

You can do that. Or you could use your server side language.... The problem comes in when the JS or client side code must run on the client. In those cases... it must run on the client. If the client can run it, the client can see it.

.... Your development machine must be sufficient enough to maximize productivity. Show your company some estimates of the amount of time wasted compiling code, compared to how fast a quality machine could do it. You can probably very easily demonstrate that a $1,000 investment in a better desktop saves them money in at least one year. I see you have a laptop, nothing precludes you from having a nice desktop that you can remote into from that laptop. You need a better machine dude, it will make life better for everyone at your company and your customers, not just yourself. Get your company to understand that.

And therein lies the culprite. I use Yahoo a lot too. Yahoo news, Yahoo mail, etc.... The Yahoo sites contain a crapton of javascript, AJAX callbacks and integration into other services like comments and ad-related stuff. These things are monstrous and they recklessly consume resources. I think they leak too, browsing several Yahoo articles and then closing all the tabs doesn't significantly reduce IE's memory footprint.