This thread became my new google status: "How to crash VS2010[^]" Very cool find. Hard to believe even, I had to try it for myself. :D

Well met. :) I hadn't considered that, but I agree.

I can barely stand using IE. At least MS is finally making an effort to follow web standards (yeah). Despite my dislike for IE, what you're describing is really odd. The database transactions happen server side, so IE's only job is to submit a POST request with your data inside and the server should take care of the rest. Obviously something got submitted if your account was charged $1. The server side behavior should be unaffected by the browser UNLESS IE and firefox submitted different data (for instance, IE didn't pick up on one of the form fields for some reason...) Firefox is awesome. I love all the extensions in it. Easily my browser of choice for web development. However, more and more I've been using Chrome b/c it's crazy fast - but I still use firefox if I'm doing web development. No browser can beat firefox's developer tools (firebug, web developer extension, etc...).

I've asked myself that several times. Java used to be my favorite programming language before I switched to .Net. The first draw for me was how easy putting together a GUI (win app) was. In Java this took significantly longer 5 years ago, although Java does have nice layout containers that .Net does not out of the box. I think other draws are other language features. Getters / Setters, Delegates, LINQ (big for a lot of people now). I like the Asp .Net model over any other web framework, and its nice that the code behinds are in a .Net language. WPF is also a very powerful framework that uses .Net as well as Silverlight. I'd be interested to hear why others are drawn to .Net over say Java or another language.

As others have said, I also recommend the BackgroundWorker, b/c it works very well and was designed to be used in conjunction with a UI. I'm curious, however, why you need a background thread at all if you do not want your GUI to be responsive. You could just do everything in the main thread if you don't want the GUI to be responsive. Also, have you considered setting Enabled = false on controls you do not want the user clicking (since you don't want them messing with things). An easier mechanism is to put controls in a panel (or container) and set Enabled = false on the panel (or container). This way the GUI is still responsive (no stupid white "not responding" window) but the user can't update / click fields either.

Instead of thinking of rows as being either even or odd, why not call them "RowStyle" and "AlternatingRowStyle" similar to microsoft's asp .net gridview. Now I'm not not promoting microsoft or it's gridview, I just agree with the naming convention.