Well, I wonder why you would want to move to the US. The life cost is extremely high, especially in metropolitan area. If you find a company wanting to hire you, be sure to get 80k+ USD$ a year at least and proper medical insurance coverage. You could also deal your housing and car. I live in the french speaking province of Quebec in Canada. I make about 40k+ canadian dollar a year and get along pretty well. And I've work only for 3 years as a professional in the IT. I own a nice 1000 sq-ft house (got a basement too) with a 5000 sq-ft terrain. The house cost me 140k$ CAD last year and I had no trouble to get a mortage with a low (5%) fixed interest rate. Living is also very affordable, we spend about 100$ per week on food, and about 225$ a month on services (telcom + electrity). There's no need for medical insurance here because there's a public system. I pay an income tax of 34% and the sale tax is 13.5%. To compare, if I take the exact same house I own into a suburb near New York, my house would value about 3 to 4 time what I paid, it would cost me twice the price for the food and three time more for services. Yet I would pay less tax on income and stuff I buy. I would have to get a job that would pay me twice what I make to come along and would still need medical insurance. Working in the states is nice for a couple of years if can get to save some cash (ie get a mortage on a house). Once you're done, sell everything you got and go back to Australia. The load of cash you will have accumulated will be higher than what you would have done during the same time in your home country. Now if you like cold, snow, speaking french and strong beer you could always come to Canada!

I'm currently writting an application and I need to load all images from a directory and display their thumbnails after. I'd need to change the preview list when the user click on another directory in the tree view, so I need to load those thumbnail fast. Currently I'm loading all those images one by one and I store them into an ImageList. I know this is not efficient and that the images stay open until the file handle is close. I'm worried about the possibility to run out of memory or of file handle if the garbage collector don't free those ressources soon enough. Do anybody have any idea how to handle efficiently images preview and loading in .Net 2.0? I've googled a lot, but didn't find anything doing it. In fast, I need an image viewer as fast as possible as I'm loading from memory card and other slow disk drive. Any idea? Let's discuss about .Net image capabilties.

I didn't though about Ottawa but that would be a great choice I think. It is a wonderfull city, being at the same time classic and modern. There is plenty of facilities and people living there usualy work for the federal governement or for some other agencies. It is well located as well, on the river Outaouais, and is 1h30 north of Montreal (I don't know from Toronto). I think it got is international air port but receive usualy more continental flight than overseas. I think you could also apply for a job for the federal governement there, there is surely some kind of programs to hire foreign workers. Once you'll get in the box, you could easily get your citizenship if your bosses back you. And don't worry for english in the Quebec's area of Hull (now Gatineau), people there tend to be more bilingual.

It's nice to see some people like to come to Canada :D I'm a french speaking quebecer, or québécois as we say here, and I'm currently living in Sherbrooke, Quebec, for the university. First of all, you seem to realy know what you want and I'll try to help you a bit. It seems that if you want some nice weather, you'll have to go for Vancouver,BC or maybe Windsor, On. -10 degrees in winter time is hard to find, as it can easily get to minus 30, even in southern Quebec in some days. But with global warming, we get less and less such hard temperature, so if you still don't mind 6-7 cold hard days during winter and can support between -15 and -25 you'll be able to live almost everywhere in the continental estern Canada. Summer time can be realy hot here in Quebec too, except that we currently have some crappy weather. Humidity play a crutial role during summer, some days temperature is 32 but can rise to 40 with the humidity factor. Still this don't happen realy often, sometime it may last a week, but not much more. Anyway, I guess you could afford an A/C at last. British Columbia is currently the best weather, but also one of the most rainy one. I think Quebec could be a nice choice, if you wouldn't mind to learn french a bit. English can be used almost anywhere in the metropolitan region of Montreal and on both shore, but once you'll get in regional area, you could have hard time, except in the eastern township, where the english speaking population is more concentrated. Also for your kids, foreigners here can go to english school so your child could learn both french and english. For the soccer teams, just look at cities that have at least 35,000 inhabitants and I'm sure there'll be no problem. The only one that you may get is to find an english speaking soccer team. Services here are all in french, except in the metropolis where it is more cosmopolitan and in some village in the eastern township. For your job I guest that you'll be able to find something in the region of Montreal. If you can get your experience recognised, I think you could easily find job at 75,000$ per year, surely more. Programmer usualy start at 45,000$. Keep in mind that taxes level on job earning are realy high (54% at max), but you'll get free medical coverage from the public system and some other services like this. For paperwork, you'll have to get a working visa and your family should be covered by it. But your wife will have to have one too if she wants to work. You're better to find the company first so it get easier for y