Captain See Sharp wrote:

What does the code do?

The short answer is: It does not work. What else? :wtf: My problem is management thinks it does. You don't want any more details, trust me.

Equally informative method signatures. "GetUpdate". No parameters, no return value. Does that tell you a lot? One that drives me crazy is "CheckEvents", which has absolutely nothing to do with a programming event, instead classes that implement Implementations (hard to write that with a straight face) X| run a stored proc to pull a date field from a SQL table.

... if you can. I honestly don't think it can be done. I recently started a new contract and I am working with some legacy code trying to implement some additional functionality. The guy who developed this "code" created an interface and he named it (drum roll) "Implementations". So you have other classes that are implementing "Implementations". No kidding. I could not make that one up if I tried. It would be really funny - if I did not actually have to work with this {deleted}. :mad:

People get breaks. What they choose to do with them is their business. More than half of all air pollution comes from passenger automobile use. I seriously doubt them smoking on the street is having a real impact on "your" air quality, not that it is yours to begin with anyway. And it's probably a good thing you are your own employer( I am too). But if I were *your* employer I would tell you "Worry about what *you* are doing, not what other people you don't even work with are doing".

I have a form with two DataGrid controls. When a user selects a row in DataGrid1, DataGrid2 is populated with child data using a filtered DataView object. I also have certain criteria that allows me to preselect a "default" row of data in DataGrid2. So basically user clicks on a row in DataGrid1, DataGrid2 is populated with all valid child data, and then the program also automatically selects a row in DataGrid2 that in most cases will be the correct selection. But the user also has the choice to change the selection in DataGrid2 before continuing. The code works fine - the CurrentCellChanged event in DataGrid1 correctly populates all rows into DataGrid2 and then additional code correctly "pre-selects" a default row in DataGrid2. In most cases the user will simply accept the default selection in DataGrid2, but they still need to be able to review the programmatic default selection before they accept it. The problem is I can preselect a default row in DataGrid2, but that selection may not always be within the rows that are visible in DataGrid2. What I want to do is ensure that the preselected (programmatically selected) default row in DataGrid2 is always visible without the user actually having to scroll down to find the preselected row. Is this possible??? TIA!!!!

Search MSDN on "Bootstrapping" and "dotnetfx" or "Net Framework" yto find the various options for installing the framework as a prerequisite.

Sorry if this is politically incorrect, but it's true: People will just assume you have lots of cash. :cool:

No problem. :cool:

You guys are a lot more mercernarial than I am. :~ Luckily I have also been in renegotiations with the people I was on contract with for the last 2 years and it looks like we are coming to a new agreement for 6-12 more months. :cool:

Tom Archer - MSFT wrote:

On average, they know next to nothing about the technologies or even the companies they're supposedly hiring for. They're nothing more than people who search the Internet/resumes doing "keyword matching" and then throwing everything they can at a job in the hopes of getting one to stick.

Yes, this is a big problem. It's also hard to find good people when you treat them like commodities.

I have to respectfully disagree with some of your statements. First of all, I think this ploy by staffing agencies is pretty transparent. They have a candidate who has interviewed and now they want to discourage that candidate from aggressively seeking other positions until they get a decision. If the candidate were not in the race, they would not bother. I see that as a certain measure of "success" even if I did not get selected. I certainly feel no need to make excuses for near misses - I was simply stating that I find the way staffing agencies handle this situation as unprofessional and unneccessary. They should simply tell me the truth. Secondly, while it may have proved successful for you as an individual, I have some reservations about the effectiveness of cold calling as you describe. But much more importantly for me as an individual, I can tell you that technique does not work at all, because I am seeking positions at small firms, usually engineering, that almost invariably do not even have HR managers, and don't typically bother to even keep resumes on file. In my 20 year professional career I have only worked at one company that even had an HR department, and they did not have one at the time when I myself was hired. I know very well how these companies function, and small companies are too busy with work to have any use for buzzwords like "out of the box" - that is a big company mentality. And I can assure you, cold calling these types of companies accomplishes nothing more than you being a 1 minute nuisance phone call to someone who is very busy and 99.9% of the time not hiring anyway. A more effective approach in my opinion, and one I would recommend to anyone, whether they are looking for a position in a small firm or a large corporation, is networking with other programmers that can recognize you have skills, rather than spending time cold calling non-technical HR people. I have gotten several job offers in this fashion from other people who got their jobs the same way. In the last couple of years I have been very busy on a contract and in my personal life, and let my networking activities lapse. I make no excuses for that either :) - I simply plan to get back out into the local user groups and get back into the local programmer community again.

This was a small company. I don't think they would bother with interviewing people if they weren't hiring. I'm pretty sure it was the staffing representative who was dicking me around. He could have just told me my interview went well and I was being considered, but they still had a few people to talk to. That's not much of an expectation. But what really burns me is this lame excuse - don't piss on me like I'm some kind of dumbass, just tell me they hired someone else, and I would have no problem with that.

Well I say recruiter, but actually it was an IT staffing agency that contacted me initially. Unfortunately, in the area where I live if you look at any of the major job sites all the positions are being offered through staffing agencies. There are practically no direct contacts.

It's a shitty way of doing business. There is nothing wrong with telling people that they are definitely being considered, but the client still has a couple of more people to interview. Then they could at least be honest about the outcome.

I've had two recent potential job openings that were being handled through recruiters, where I interviewed with the actual client, and was contacted after the interview by the recruiter with some sort of vague informal offer. Specifically, the last one told me this: "The company liked you, thought you were a good fit, we have to get some paperwork together, and we'll be back in touch, just be patient, the guy hiring for the position has a lot on his plate right now and sometimes he is a little slow to follow through". Then I get a call a week later saying unfortunately "budgetary constraints" have changed but we'll keep your resume on file. Budgetary changes in mid-March - uhmm right. The first time I thought it was just a fluke. Now I feel like this is probably SOP at staffing companies to keep a few people on the hook that the client thinks are good possibles until a final selection has been made. Have many of you experienced this?

Have you tried enabling verbose logging to try and troubleshoot the problem? http://support.microsoft.com/kb/q250842[^]

I'm not sure I understand your question. There is always some degree of latency, because the actual setup does not exist on the client machine, it is only assigned. That means that when each client starts up, it has to first transfer the setup to the local machine from some central network location. Only then does the actual setup run. If you are starting a lot of clients at the same time maybe what you are seeing is a long delay because of competition for network bandwidth as a large number of clients all try to download the same package????

Anna-Jayne Metcalfe wrote:

Testing against true is really dangerous, particularly if you have to deal with COM VARIANT_BOOL or MFC style BOOL types as well as the built in bool type. This also applies if you are testing the return values of SDK functions which return != 0 for success.

I tend to prefer a little more verbose than a lot less verbose. But overall, I think consistency is the most important thing. This is something a hate about Microsoft - they are not consistent. While it's true that most Win32 APIs return !=0 for "success", most if not all MSI APIs return ERROR_SUCCESS = 0. I think this is incredibly bad practice.

If the DLL is a standard "C" style DLL that does not require registration (as opposed to a COM DLL) simply add it to your setup development project as a file and set the install folder to the application directory, or the WinSys folder. If the DLL is a COM DLL then it presumably is already referenced by your NET project and the wizard should add it to the setup automatically. In this case you also need the Primary Interop Assembly (PIA) for the C++ DLL. Again, the setup wizard usually, but not always, adds everything else you need to register a COM DLL referenced by a NET project. In either case, you must also pay attention to any additional dependency DLLs your C++ DLL may require. You can use the Dependency Walker utility to determine dependency DLLs. If these are all standard system DLLs you should not have to add any dependencies on Win2K or higher systems. Finally, be certain to test your setup on a "clean" machine - i.e. one with a fresh OS install, but no development tools. Setups generally always "work" when tested on a dev machine, but may easily fail on a "field" target machine.

I have an engineering degree - chemical - which is totally unrelated to most programming, but it did help me get my first software dev job. As far as certifications go, (as long as you live in or near a decent size metro area where there are programming interest groups) here is the way to get the most bang for your buck: 1) Pick an area you feel like is your strongest place to start. Buy a good cert book in that area with lots of code samples (I like Que books, Microsoft books generally suck). 2) Spend a few weeks on your own working with the book to get at least somewhat up to speed on the material. 3) Find and join a local study group for the same cert - usually not hard in any decent metro area - people organize informal study groups via the web, at Barnes and Nobles etc. 4) Hopefully someone in the study group will have a job - and hopefully since you have "pre-pared" before joining the group you will seem pretty on the ball. You never know - I have gotten one job offer from a cert study group. Worse case scenario, you'll engage in some networking that turns out to be totally useless. Hopefully you'll pass the exam though :-) In any case, if you are going to study for a cert exam, makes some contacts in the process - it may not help, it certainly cannot hurt. Good luck!