xiecsuk: I am probably the only guy here anywhere near your age. I know how hard it is to master "new" stuff after 60. It appears that you are saying: "I am a 74 year old long-time VB developer. I am going to build something in .Net Core with ASP and C#, none of which I have ever used before. I don't have time to wait for VB in 2017 because I am so old". 2017 will be one of your more interesting years ...

At this point there are 12 comments in this thread that recommend either VB or C#. Technically the answer is obvious: he wants to do it in .Net Core. .Net Core doesn't support VB. End of story. What is interesting are the reasons given. Of the 12, only one correctly identifies the fundamental issue. Of the remainder, one suggests VB ("if you already know it"). A good answer (if you are ignorant of the .Net Core VB support issue). One comment is neutral. In the way of things this neutral comment is the longest in the thread. Prevaricators in Shakespeare always have the longest speeches. That leaves nine recommendations - all of which can be classed as "virtue signalling", with no real information content. The most blatant simply say that {bad people} use VB. Where {bad people} are either "liberal snowflakes" or "conservative flatulents". Two of these. Also blatant are comments like "syntactically hideous VB" and "favorite loathsome script language du jour". Two of these. Then there is the milder form of "C# is the industry standard". The virtue signal here is: "I am like all the others - you too should conform". Three of these. One comments suggests that our man use C# because "you should work on being a polyglot programmer". The virtue signal here is "improve yourself!". Enthusiastic support for C# over VB is almost always just of form of virtue signalling by insecure people. Software development is a faddish, politically correct, and unstable industry. Virtue signalling is very important in that environment. My recommendation to a young developer is not to reject virtue signalling because it is shabby, ignoble and false. Rather embrace it, use it to secure your cubicle over the long term.

"because it's probably never been done before" As people here have noted "it HAS been done before". Labview (1986) Borland Object Vision (1990) Scratch (2002) And many others ... The real question is "Why do these non-verbal programming tools never take off?". And: "Why can't I program in Emojis?"

I hire online developers (in a small way). My teenage son (a keen developer), a couple years back, tried to get me to hire people from TopTal. "No way", I said, "they are all pose".

What is extensively? I have a small set of extension methods, but I use them a lot. On sealed classes. Examples: DBInt("columnName") - returns int value of column in a datarow, and cleans up DBNull issues. HiddenCreditCard(CC Number String) - returns CC Number showing only first and last four digits, with asters in between.

I have made all my income from software development since 1982. The last 10 years has been as a Freelancer. A couple points not made yet: - Programming is an inherently frustrating job. If you can't deal with constant frustration, stay away. - My advice is always: If you are over 30, you are too old to start out in programming. Not because 30+ people can't learn, but because you need to be interested in programming to make it work for you. This planet is awash with computers, compilers and IDE's. If you have been swimming in this sea of opportunity for 3 decades and haven't yet learn't to program, well you just aren't interested. This advice would go double for a systems/network dude. - No one here, AFAIK, has given you an honest, direct, answer to your question "Can I make a decent living". The short answer is "no". The long answer is: "Compared with what you can earn now as a systems/network dude - no. At least not for a number of years.".

Gus: I think you can see that you have a simple array error. The compiler seems to have been quite clear about that. I suggest that you resolve that array error. The code will then work fine. I cannot help you any further with this issue Gus.

Gus: Some comments on that code: (a) It looks like it is working. You have defined an event handler for receiving data from the serial port. You "get the weight readings", so we know that event handler works. (b) The "GetTareAndWeight" code tells me that the scale sends both Weight and Tare in the same string. Something like "10.3, 2.0". This must be working when you "get weight readings" - otherwise it would crash with an array error. (c) After receiving a weight txtBox2 (a multiline textbox) should look something like this: "10.3, 2.0" "2" "Tare: 2.0" (d) If your code received a string containing Tare only, ie, "2.0", then it will crash in "GetTareAndWeight" on the line 'txtBox2.Text &= "Tare: " & strWeights(1).ToString' Question for you Gus: "gives an error when I press the Tare button on the indicator". What is the error?

Gus: I did a lot of code interfacing with industrial weight scales back in the late nineties (with VB6). I did have some generic routines that would talk good with most scales out there. Among the places my code was running was a cheese factory (small scales - a few kilos), and a fertilizer depot (big scales - 15 ton trucks). Not sure if I can find that code now (nearly 20 years later). Post the code you use, and the scale brand and model - I will have a look :)

Depends on how you read it. In VB you should generally do something like:

com1 = My.Computer.Ports.OpenSerialPort("COM1")
com1.ReadTimeout = 10000
Do
Dim Incoming As String = com1.ReadLine()
If Incoming Is Nothing Then
Exit Do
Else
returnStr &= Incoming & vbCrLf
End If

Incoming is just a string - you can trim, replace chars etc to suit. ReadLine reads from the serial port, until the first newline char. Do another ReadLine to get the next bit. Alternatives: ReadChar - reads one character ReadByte - ditto for one byte ReadTo - Read up to a given char ReadExisting - Read whatever is in port buffer This is a good tutorial on how to do serial port comms in VB: http://www.me.umn.edu/courses/me2011/smartprodcourse/technotes/docs/serial-port-vb.pdf[^]

I have been using MS SQL Server since it first came out (in the mid-nineties). For the first few years we were using a set of Sybase manuals because we didn't have any SQL Server manuals (and Google was very unresponsive back then). In those days, if you knew what the differences were between Sybase and SQL Server you were at Guru level. But I have never used the "View Designer". The couple times I stumbled into it by accident, I got out of there ASAP. To be honest, it's not that I disdain it's UI, SQL skills, or anything like that. I just don't understand it. I have seen people who can go in there, make views, copy the SQL out to use elsewhere etc. I can't do that. I have been coding SQL since the early 80's (DEC VAX RDB). I can code SQL queries faster than I can say what I am doing. But I don't get that View Designer.

Sure - at my age, I'm immune to peer pressure :) I have been doing small contracts for various units of a State Government for about 5 years. I charge them more than I do my regular clients. Nearly everyone employed full-time at this Dept is a lawyer or para-legal of some sort. They are cool with very high hourly rates. And I definitely tell them "I am an Access developer". I would say I spend about 4 weeks a year being (posing as?) an Access Dev. Officially, any custom-software they want must be built by the State Govt IT Dept (average delivery schedule: 5 - 10 years). But they can get stuff done in Access, because according to MS, it's not "dev" software. Often I work on Access DB's that were originally built by "actual" Access Dev's. I have seen their web-sites, and chatted by phone with one of them. So they are not "posers" like me. The design and code of those DB's are ... interesting. My work is easier in those cases, because I am constantly telling the users: "I can make this stuff a LOT easier for you". "No, you don't need to keep doing that, we can get Access to do it for you". What happened, after the first job I did for a unit of this Dept, is that my users boasted about "their" Access guy around the water cooler, I got called in by another unit, etc. Not a full time living there, but good pin-money. I learned to program in BASIC on a Tandy TRS-80 in the late 70's while I was working as a Diesel mechanic in an iron-ore mine. In the more than 30 years since then I have been paid to code in COBOL, RPG, Visual Basic, VB.Net, C#. And the SQL - don't forget the SQL. In all of those languages and environments SQL is the most useful tool you can have. Even in Access. Back to the original question: When that stupid Query Builder tool in Access gives me the tom-tits, I just switch over to SQL View - suddenly everything is sweetness and light! (once I've deleted all the brackets of course)

Yes and No actually ... ... AFAIK Access versions prior to 2007 did do the crazy brackets thing. But 2007 onwards did not. I have a client (government department) stuck on Access 2003. Another client has Access 2007. I noticed the difference in the brackets thing between those two versions. Unless there is some setting somewhere I don't know about (I'm not an Access dev y'know).

Sure Ian. Can I just get this straight: You scored 185 or 200 on a professionally supervised IQ test. But you failed a Mensa test (passing grade = 132). Because "

Quote:

Which of these things is not like the other?" questions were really "Which of the several obvious answers to this is the one we decided is correct?", and I lost time on the math section because I hadn't done long multiplication/division by hand in years

To people who are familiar with IQ testing Ian, those excuses are quite funny. Both of them reveal an inability to understand the concepts. False negatives, ie, scoring lower than you can, (deliberate, language problems, illness etc) are quite possible on those tests. It happens sometimes. False positives, ie, scoring higher than you should, has only ever been achieved by cheating. And usually requires collusion with the test proctor. EDIT: Just thinking about my own experience, I have toned this post down a bit. It is quite possible you tested low at Mensa because of illness, or after-effects of something (I don't want to say drugs or anything). I had the experience, for several years, of being "dumb" - due to illness. When I look back at the (not so good) code I wrote back then I can remember how "hard" everything seemed to be. Still, I did manage to complete a couple projects in a reasonable manner. So maybe "average" people can cut code ...

Wombat: (a) IQ score determines individual success pretty much in proportion to the prevailing level of meritocracy. (b) Ie, rigidly structured societies heavily dampen IQ sorting. In history we can often find the top strata of some societies infested with complete maroons. (c) Wombats have square poop. I have one that often browses through my back yard, leaving scat.

Flynn effect - quite true. It may be an artefact of generally increasing childhood health, nutrition etc. When the greatest proportion of "the population" (choose yours) has roughly the same conditions as the previous generation, the Flynn Effect will become very interesting.

Not so smart of me :)

IQ testing (professionally supervised tests) are PREDICTIVE. Any given set of high-IQ people will have better life-time outcomes in all sorts of areas (health, wealth, longevity among others). Their outcomes will be rather better than any given set of "average" people. Their outcomes will be immensely better than any given set of very low IQ people. There are NO tests for art, craftsmanship or sport that are predictive. None. Except for IQ tests of course :) (Forget physical tests you morons - of course you it helps to be to be tall to play Basketball, and to have two legs to play football).

IQ testing (professionally supervised tests) are PREDICTIVE. Any given set of high-IQ people will have better life-time outcomes in all sorts of areas (health, wealth, longevity among others). Their outcomes will be rather better than any given set of "average" people. Their outcomes will be immensely better than any given set of very low IQ people. There are NO tests for art, craftsmanship or sport that are predictive. None. Except for IQ tests of course :) (Forget physical tests you morons - of course you it helps to be to be tall to play Basketball, and to have two legs to play football).

Well, 12023988, there is a lot of dross in this thread. I am sure I have seen "average IQ" people coding C# (and other languages). No, it wasn't pretty, but they were paid to do it. Y'see, there are an awful lot of "average" people in Management, making the hiring decisions. I recall one case (obviously a "diversity" hire) where I rewrote a program of hers. This was a positive mentoring exercise. No pressure, lead by example etc. We went over the two versions of code. To be honest, you people have NO idea how bad her code was. The problem was, neither did she. Even after the mentoring session, she still had no idea. She was at that company for just over a year, and job-hopped over to another company - pay rise and promotion included.