I use the telerik winforms suite for similar operations, because it can :laugh: Telerik gridview

Just to let you know, PDFSharp will let you open an existing PDF and then you can add text\images easily - tis fast to :)

Regarding point 1, I generally embed a web page viewer. Most other points can be addressed using PDFSharp, this is an open source library which allows you to merge, edit, split, create, etc PDF's in .NET ... Highly recommended! You would need to build a front end round it for editing though.

Am in a similar postion, currently we are using this dotproject, covers 90% of our management requirements and is open source.

I use Dia, its a good open source program & is also useful for network layouts and OOD.

For users who can't grasp FTP I normally recommend Filezilla as it is easy to walk users through setting up a FTP connection and it can remember connections for future use. The other way we transfer is to setup custom client portal sites, if you were to outlay something like £30 per year + £40 one off cost you could setthis up quite easily with a DNN ISP like websecurestores.com.

Interoperability

I have used Apex SQL[^] before and its pretty good, is scriptable from a command prompt to.

I have developed several CRMs over the years and used to prefer coding them as windows form applications, far easier to get round the program model etc. However with the recent surge in development with AJAX tools (particularly since I started using the Telerik suite and DotNetNuke framework) - I have found web based complex apps far easier to code and there are little or no deployment issues. There are still a few things you can't do easily in a web page, but once you establish a communication framework between server and client without full postbacks its pretty straight forward. I share your pain though, sometimes managers lose sight of how an application will work in favour of the latest trends - Its always a bad experience for the developer because it seems that suddenly your experience is disregarded in favour of a magazine article that the aforementioned manager read the day before.

I agree with you on all points 1 & 2, I've had to fix a large amount of legacy and so-called professional code before I could use it - some call me a perfectionist for this but I always feel any piece of unreadble code lets a whole project down. As for GOTO statements I have always thought that they've had a bad press - true they can be quite destructive and make code hard to read if used badly, but if commented and used correctly they can actually save a lot of code and hacks to get round the workflow. Save the GOTO's!

Build the VB6 functionality into a DLL and build a interface for it in .NET, then migrate the functionality when time is not so pressing...

I would suggest looking at http://www.dotnetnuke.com/[^], this supplies a whole web framework and you can get free shopping cart software which works well with it. I have used the following dnn module for ecommerce http://dnnsoft.com/[^], its not free but the basic version is a bargin for £40 and has all the functionality for small business users.

Was just going to recommend IcoFx :-) I use it for desktop and web icons and have had no problems.

I've been to 2 of the SQL MCP courses in the UK, they were OK but I could have learnt most of the information from the training notes supplied. The only benefit of the training courses was a occasional paid week out in London :laugh:

Later correction - have optimised the image processing down to 0.2 seconds. If you choose the C# method check out the folllowing codeproject app : http://www.codeproject.com/KB/GDI-plus/edge_detection.aspx?display=Print[^]

Cool, congrats on that as optimisation of code is never bad in my book ;-) Seeing the original reply just reminded me of the nightmare of my university days - One teacher insisted everything be done in assembler stacks.

Ouch...just ouch... :-)

Funny you should ask as I have been developing image processor routines in C# for the past 2 weeks for OCR apps. Image manipulation is fairly easy once you are able to pull images into the correct binary classes, then I have been able to apply image transitions quite easily on a bit by bit level. Its not as fast as I would like but I have not optimised the code at all, it takes about 3 seconds to apply a brighten & sharpen filter on a 247k grayscale tiff. I am limited by the choice of language here though and have no idea on how fast java would perform.

If you want to pay £30 then I recommend http://www.bitdefender.com/[^], this contains all the tools I need with a small footprint. If you want a half decent free package I would recommend http://www.comodo.com/[^], the av and firewall are pretty good, the antispyware is not so good.

Good question, I have developed sites in both and this is not intended as a biased statement on any platform\language. In my own experience: * PHP gives the developer a very slimmed down model which you have to build up on - this results in lots of code and a mind set where you have to build in functions etc from the outset of your page. This kind of programming model is useful for forums as the majority of the required code is function and display based stuff. * ASP (particularly .NET) gives you a fuller model where if you want a particular set of functionality at a later date you can call it up pretty easily, but it takes a lot more work to slim down the model for optimisation purposes. If you follow the MS line you look more at thread processing and hardware optimisations, but I normally find performance problems are traced back to the database used. As people have mentioned before it is often not the language or platform, but the developers who slow things up by hack coding or poor design - if you are familiar with a language you learn the optimum coding patterns I guess.