Led Zeppelin, May 1973 at Dallas Memorial Auditorium.

Trust me, it could be worse. My company sells a very large application using a SQL Server database. There are over 1500 tables in the database. You can count the number of defined FK relations on one hand and I suspect those were added by mistake. I have brought this up several times and it's always the same answer. We don't need no stinking FK relations in the database - the application code handles all of that. Of course, the poor support people constantly have to deal with application issues caused by orphaned data, etc.

Like everything else in programming, it depends. In this case it depends on the SQL ansi_nulls setting. If this is a statement inside a SQL stored procedure, view, etc the ansi_nulls setting is burned into the object when it is created. If this is an ad-hoc statement then the ansi_nulls setting in effect for the SQL connection the statement is executed against is used. If you want null <> 'value' to return true, you could just set ansi_nulls off. Not that I would recommend doing that...

I've been doing this for almost 30 years as well. All of it with the same company, if you disregard the 2 times my company was bought by competitors in the last 12 years. I still enjoy what I do, more or less. After the last acquisition a couple years ago they closed the office where I worked so now I get to work from home, pretty much doing what I have been doing for almost 30 years. In some ways I am stuck in my career but in reality it is winding down any way. I have golden handcuffs. I can't expect to go somewhere else at my age and enjoy the same pay and benefits I currently have. That being said, if I win the $600M+ Mega Millions tonight I will not quit. I will however become very difficult to manage!

I just went through open enrollment with my employer. I used to have pretty good PPO coverage for my wife and myself that cost me 225/month, with my employer kicking in another 350/month. The deductible was 2500/5000 but there were copays for doctor visits, prescriptions, etc. that effectively kept us from spending a lot on health care unless we had a major event.

Those days are gone. My only choice this year was a High Deductible Health Plan coupled with a Health Savings Account. My portion of the premium did decrease to 150/month but I basically have to pay for everything out of pocket up to the 2500/5000 deductible per year. That means I have to pay the doctor the FULL price for an office visit, the pharmacy for the FULL price for a prescription, etc. until I have laid out 2500/5000 for the year. Then the insurance will actually kick in and pay something, typically 90% in network. At least the Health Savings Account allows me to plan for that and the contributions are pre-tax. Unlike a Flexible Spending Account, unused money in the HSA is not forfeited at the end of the year and I get to take it with me if I change emplyers (not likely, I've been with this company 29+ years).

Such a deal.

I hate to rain on your parade, but you're dreaming if you think you are going to get 17 MPG in a Titan. I own one, bought it 9 years ago and still have it. Around town I'm lucky if i get 11 MPG. The best it has ever done was on a recent trip round trip from Dallas to Kansas City. That was 15.5-16 MPG, almost all highway driving for 1000 miles. Don't get me wrong, I love the truck. It's the best vehicle I've ever owned.

Young whippersnapper. One word. Vinyl.

If it's a Windows application you don't have to modify the references. You can add reference paths to the project that will resolve the actual reference to a different folder. Right click on the project file, click properties, go to the references tab, and click reference paths.

There is no need to write a parser to split the lines into a string array. Look at the Microsoft.VisualBasic.FileIO.TextFieldParser class. It will parse fixed width or CSV text files a line at a time.

You can download the US Treasury Department Specially Designated Nationals List (SDN) here: http://www.treas.gov/offices/enforcement/ofac/sdn/[^]

If you're using VS 2005, you could also use the ToTable method of the System.Data.DataView class.