Got this question - I am working in a company that has been using VS2003 and the older .NET framework for all its projects; I want to experiment with web-development, ASP 2.0 but I am wary of any compatibility problems. If I install the 2.0 SDK and continue to use VS2003 and projects developed in previous .NET, should everything work fine, or should I expect some issues? Thanks in advance..

Got this question - I am working in a company that has been using VS2003 and the older .NET framework for all its projects; I want to experiment with web-development, ASP 2.0 but I am wary of any compatibility problems. If I install the 2.0 SDK and continue to use VS2003 and projects developed in previous .NET, should everything be fine? Thanks in advance..

Very good - thanks for your reply. Your comments echo my general impressions. About the size of the project - maybe something like the following progression of steps: 1. 1st prototype - almost no interface, very basic functionality, no real users, testbed for technologies (1 person * 0.5 years) 2. Beta version - basic interface, almost full functionality, several hundred users (2 person * 1 year) 3. Version 1.0 - unlimited users (developers?, time?) So by Step 2, need to lock into a set of tools for the rest of development.. Regarding speed and power, [JavaScript]+[Java] is more or less in the same league as [ASP.NET]+[C#], or am I mistaken?

I want to start developing a scalable web application, with the goal of starting a company in 1-2 years. The application would be something like a dating site, requiring: 1. Support for many users 2. Database access 3. Access to a toolbox of algorithms developed in a high-level language. (I'd like to develop something that has a simple front-end, not too much scripting stuff, with most of the coding done in something like C# or Java). I do not have experience with serious web development, and I am not a great systems guy (i.e. setting up servers, connections, tuning configuration files is not something I look forward to), so ease of setup and maintenance of the server, database, etc, is very important to me. In the past, I have worked a little in UNIX/Linux environments with Java, C, but most of my coding has been done in Windows using MS products (VisualStudio, C++/.NET), and in general I have found development with MS solutions easier, and in the case of .NET, more powerful. What I really want to find is some analysis of long-term web-development pros/cons for Unix/Linux vs. MS+.NET. Right now I am thinking about how to obtain all software/hardware to run something like: [MS Win 2003 Server Web]+[VS .NET]+[MS SQL or My SQL] but it seems pretty expensive, and I would like to be sure that going with Linux tools is not the better option in the long-run. I would greatly appreciate your thoughts on the subject, or any links to related information on the web. Thanks! - Vlad G.

This question is directed towards MSMQ in .NET (System.Messaging.MessageQueue, etc), but is relevant to messaging in general. Suppose I have a lot of messages coming through some queue (~1000 msgs/sec), and some function ProcessMessage(Message msg) that I want to invoke to process each message. There are two ways to read these messages asynchronously (MSMQ/.NET): 1. Begin a thread (or Timer thread) that periodically polls the queue (MessageQueue.Receive()), retrieves a new message, calls ProcessMessage(). 2. Call the asynchronous MessageQueue.BeginReceive() to which you pass your callback function (as delegate). Then when a new message comes, the MessageQueue will automatically call your callback function. The difference in performance is unclear to me. In the second case, it seem you have to do less work, since you get notified automatically when a message arrives instead of having to write a thread that checks this; however, there is more flexibility in the first approach, because you control exactly how the check for new messages is performed, how often, etc. But I am really only interested in performance, and though I am going to write some simple examples to test this, I am not sure that they will be representative of what happens under a real load. Does anybody have thoughts on this? Thanks! -Vlad