:omg:

Pete McNamee "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing."

I'd start looking for something new immediately. I left a company that was managed in the exact way that you are describing. I'm still friends with many of the developers and the madness continues with threats from upper management and consistent long hours to meet ever changing, unrealistic demands.

Pete McNamee "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing."

I thought I had seen this quote before. It's on quotationspage.com: Programming today is a race between software engineers striving to build bigger and better idiot-proof programs, and the Universe trying to produce bigger and better idiots. So far, the Universe is winning. Rick Cook[^], The Wizardry Compiled

I don't see it either. Do you have to have certain status to see that link?

Pete McNamee "True knowledge exists in knowing that you know nothing."

There are actually 2 different controls that provide similar functionality. There is the 'legacy' splitter control that is the same as the previous versions of visual studio. You have to drop a panel, then the splitter, then another panel. The better control, IMO, is the SplitContainer. This shows up with a default left and right panels already configured. You can change the orientation so it is top and bottom. It is a container control so you can drop pretty much whatever you want inside of the contained panels. You'll most likely want to set the minimum sizes for the panels (property names will be Panel1MinSize and Panel2MinSize. This will keep the user from shrinking them too far. I hope that helps a little.

Pete

If you date someone that you work with directly then there is more chance for awkward situations to arise if things don't work out or if one of you ends up managing/supervising the other. If you are in separate groups then you don't have to deal with office conflict or awkwardness.

Pete

Language choice should not really be the deciding factor. If you are a good developer than the switch should be relatively easy. It will just take a little while to start committing function calls and other language-specific stuff to memory. A bad manager is way worse than learning new technology, plus the new experience is always good for the resume. Many people leave a company because of a bad manager. It definitely detracts from the whole work experience. As far as the girl - make an effort to get to know her without the change in departments. Office romance definitely works better when you don't work directly together. Good luck in whatever choice you make.

Pete

I've read a portion of the book and it has been great so far. Many fellow developers in my office rave about it too. All examples are in Java but that hasn't bothered any of us. We are a purely MS shop that focuses almost exclusively on C# development (.Net 2003 and 2005) with some older code in C++ and some pourly written apps in VB6.

Pete

A great design patterns book is Head First Design Patterns published by O'Reilly. It is focused on Java but can easily be understood and applied to other languages.

Pete

No kidding! It has the most widely accepted word processing application in particular (and business applications in general). I personally use Office 2003 and am a little bit cautious to upgrade to 2007 just because of the file incompatibility with older versions. There is the option to use a 'Save As' to make files compatible but you lose all new functionality. I do want to get Outlook 2007 though. That said, the only reason that I have upgraded to 2003 is that I have MSDN subscription at work so I don't have to pay for the upgrades. Money is usually the limiting factor for me.

Pete