Thanks for the advice, that's very useful :)

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I'm just changing my job role from developer to a more management-y position atm; one of things I'm really happy about with my new employer is that it's mandatory for me to maintain my development skills. For me, I don't think that management need to be writing 'production' code as a matter of course - but they need to be capable of doing it [competently], and able to function at that level. Learning a new skillset doesn't mean abandoning old ones!

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Always a good technique - and often true, as those who've left are the ones who couldn't code well enough!

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Quite true, though its possible to make a regex readable (at least in PERL) by using the "ignore whitespace" option which allows you both to break it over several lines and to embed comments see this article[^]

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Alternate nomination: XSL

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I find using my Windows 7 desktop at work frustratingly slow and difficult compared to my Linux desktop at home (we've had an MS-free house for about five years now). And I also love my Linux^H^H^H^H^H Android phone. The inability to do trivial things like delete files because they're in use and the general sluggishness of the desktop drive me spare in Windows. On the other hand, the lousy video drivers and often poor-quality userspace [gconf and bonobo, I'm looking at you...] wind me up with a GNU system (be it Linux or BSD). And mono... ugh.... But, given a choice and without any specific task requirements that force Windows, I'll take Linux anytime thanks. One interesting thing though is that we were recently burgled and my wife's laptop was stolen. While we're waiting for the insurance, she's been using a similar spec. Windows laptop borrowed from work - and has been complaining about the frustrations of having to use Windows. Although reasonably clued up about computers in general, she's not a "techy" and doesn't go near the CLI without instructions.

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Is your VS build available externally, or only to MS employees?

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Damn, I've been using C# full-time since 1.0 beta back in 2001 and still haven't used it enough to understand, eh? How many LoC's do I have to write before I see?? I'm well aware that many of the decorations can only be applied to properties, but that's a restriction stemming from the initial design rather than a technical one; many attributes can be applied at a field level rather than property, and could quite easily be checked using a either a FieldInfo or a PropertyInfo. The fact that a different design decision was made in some frameworks to use AttributeTargets.Property instead of AttributeTargets.Property|AttributeTargets.Field doesn't alter the underlying fact that the automatic property is wasteful. Of course, whether it's actually noticeable is a different issue!

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I don't like properties either - syntactic sugar for functions. And don't get me started on "automatic" properties... let's execute all of the mechanics of calling a function, but don't let the programmer do any work in it :doh:. The rationale of "don't expose fields" was so that any business logic can be encapsulated in the property get/set functions - but automatic properties might as well be a public field and a block of NOP's

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Do apologise - I missed the dereference void *one = &0; void *two = &0; Good thing I haven't used C for years :)

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Why else do they have the ref parameter for passing parameters to functions, to avoid ambiguity. No - it's so that you can do this: void func(void *ptr) { ptr = NULL; } // ... func(&ptr); The ref keyword is the equivalent of & ; it is NOT syntactic sugar.

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void* one = 0; void* two = 0; BOOL same = (one == two); // false - the lvalues of one and two are different BOOL sameValue = (*one == *two); // true - the rvalues are the same *one = 1; *two = 2; same = (one == two); // false - the lvalues are different sameValue = (*one == *two); // false - the rvalues are different now There's a reason why C# is called a C-based language... you may wish to brush up on your knowledge of pointers...

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less is excellent, although it's text mode only - it has great searching, multi-file support, arbitrary length files and so on - http://sourceforge.net/projects/gnuwin32/files/less/[^], although that seems quite old (I'm using v429) and there may well be more recent ports Standard *nix util :)

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Don't fear the reaper - Blue Oyster Cult

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The documentation you're talking about was the FM I was referring to ... previously came in the form of large, ring-bound dead trees much of which just said "This page left intentionally blank" but now comes in various electronic formats that decay faster. IE - the FM, not one of the zillion "If you can't be bothered to RTFM, this explains it" books there are now. Yup, I learnt back at that time, too! Part of my learning actually came from reverse engineering CP/M :-D .loop ld bc,0003h ld hl,[2600h] int 21h djnz .loop

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RTFM. That's how we learnt.

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Blumen wrote:

9 Pour one-half cup vodka and one-half cup water into a Ziploc freezer bag and freeze for a slushy, refreshing ice pack for

a nice warm summer day

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Couldn't agree more with Brad on this; in my role, we're permitted some R&R and given a degree of freedom. In return, I choose to work past my contracted hours and generally give the company back a degree of flexibity. Works well for us both. I've also worked in an environment that was locked down; the commitment from the employees was a lot less, and the morale much lower. After a couple of years, I decided to move to an employer who treats me with respect... now, I write more code, probably of better quality, and enjoy doing it.

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> Also, for those of you with significant home network environments, I'd be interested in your strategies for organizing & managing data, servers, etc. I have a network of seven boxes at home; each of these is designed for a particular function. The basic stratagem for data is to keep it on at least two separate machines; for example, the financial data is replicated between the server and the desktop, music between the server, the desktop and the HTPC, and so on. With three exceptions (the HTPC, the desktop, and my wife's laptop) all of the machines are built out of "scrap" hardware I've accumulated with newish HDD's fitted. The server runs am IDE RAID-1 array and (very occasionally :sigh: ) I dump the contents to tape. Replication is performed using the Unison application, which is quite nice and works cross platform (one desktop still runs Windows, although she's due for upgrade to Linux next month). The Coda filing system looks interesting for data replication, and also appears to offer a Windows implementation; haven't done any serious investigation on it yet. Security-wise, the network is extremely weak; all accounts are local to each machine (although I strive to keep the passwords in sync), and the data is unencrypted. My game plan is to to encrypt the data partitions, and replicate the encrypted data; then, use a hardware token (read: USB key with certificate) for local decryption on whatever box I happen to be using. This will provide security against physical theft. There's a wireless network running WPA containing the HTPC and the laptop; router/firewall between this an the internet; then another firewall between the wireless segment and the server, which has another firewall onto the wired segment and routes between the two.

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