4 hours ago, Bass wrote

@BitFlipper:

I think the Microsoft developer community was given plenty of opportunity to innovate on Microsoft's "superior" proprietary platforms but they didn't produce anything substantive. In the mean time all the interesting innovation has been happening on the open web and non-Microsoft mobile platforms.

Microsoft as a platform vendor depends on you to make apps that make their platform more attractive. But they can't wait forever for you to produce. They've waited years and gave you stuff like WPF and Silverlight and what have they gotten in return? You didn't give them any reason to keep catering for you.

So they look at the non-Microsoft developer community with a sort of envy. They are courting the developers that made Android, iOS and the Web successful instead of their "old guard" (.NET/Win32 developers, etc.) who haven't been very productive at all. They want developers from the Slashdot community. You know, the "trolls".. who maybe used to spell Microsoft with a dollar sign but these are more concerned about the rising power of Apple and Google.

Unfortunately since you bet on a proprietary platform your skills don't transfer, and if proprietary platform X you specialized on goes away, so goes your career along with it. You have no control over your own career, but thing is, you never had any control because of the choices you made and were probably warned about. So you are angry, I get it. All I can say is we told you so

Huh? Proprietary versus FOSS? How is that displayed in current market data? Apple is the largest by capital and is proprietary. Android makes more money for Microsoft, a proprietary company, than the originators. Google just flipped the open source community a fork on Webkit so they could, in my words, move along without the baggage, a decidedly proprietary approach. I'm not seeing it.

Before Visual Studio .NET I recall writing many a utility whose sole purpose was to write code for me.  Usually some boiler plate or repetitive code that had some domain specific something that made it unique.  We did a lot of custom code then.

Generating POCOs via T4 templates sounds a lot more fun than via T-SQL.

1 hour ago, davewill wrote

@JohnAskew: Curious.  Went looking for alternative DNS under such a scenario and ran across http://pcsupport.about.com/od/tipstricks/a/free-public-dns-servers.htm stating the following Level 3 Communications DNS addresses.  According to the note queries to those addresses automatically route to the nearest DNS.  How would you see and verify that?  How would those nearest addreses be uncovered so they could be used directly?

Level31

209.244.0.3

209.244.0.4

the brain just needed a break. sysinternals tcpmon or procmon.

The real concern is inadvertently doing so.  As in the use of devices that automatically follow the strongest signal. I wouldn't want to be fined or do jail time in that situation. There must already be some industry "understanding" in this regard (i.e. this is an area where we can't make technology "just work" for the user). Is that the case? Is every wireless radio designed such that it requires a user to initiate a connection to a specific access point?

Another area of concern ... I don't want grandma going to jail because over the phone her 15 year old grandson told her to "select the one with the most bars" because surely that has to be her router she just plugged up. Poor grandma happened to select the neighbors "open" network and it allowed her to connect. Poor grandma in the hooscow.

Just seems that the "open" network should provide more legal leeway than a secure network.

1 hour ago, cbae wrote

@JohnAskew: You failed to mention that you got some camera time too!

So much for any future career in undercover work.

I present to you the CHEEVINATOR. (naming convention borrowed from Dr. Heinz Doofenshmirtz)

WWW.CHEEVINATOR.COM will gather cheevos from as many places as cheevos can exist: xbox, visual studio, PS3 trophies, apple, android, you tube account views, fan counts, break dance ratings, etc.  The possibilities are endless.

CHEEVINATOR will be the ultimate bank for cheevos.

Anyone can open an account on the CHEEVINATOR.  Once an account has been established cheevos from any other cheevo sources may be deposited.

Now...

1. you get a single pile of cheevos.

2. you potentially get cheevos from any number of disparate cheevo sources.

3. all the cheevites have a common platform within which to compare their cheevocity.

Additionally...

cheevos in the "bank" could be exchanged like currency for goods or services provided by fellow cheevites. cheevites don't have a problem with the "ladies" so I don't think we need to worry about this exchange encouraging prostitution.

Some needed changes...

your cheevo formula will be used to calculate the cheevo total for each account.  (Cheevos * 2) + youtube views + social media fans(myspace, facebook) + (breakdance skill leve(1-10) * 50,000). however, the formula will need to be tweaked.  it is currently too heavily weighted for break dancing and therefore is NOT handicap friendly.  suggest some alternative formulas.

How to fund the operation of the CHEEVINATOR...

initially thoughts of a percentage of cheevos deposited seemed the most obvious.

however, since data center operators do not accept payment in the form of cheevos we will have to turn to advertising.

we will have the usual left and right side advertising with the user content in the middle.

until the site can build some momentum to attract higher dollar advertisers we are going to need you Dan276 to work out a deal with Pauly D to advertise.  We will guarantee him a top left advertising spot at the top 5 minutes of every hour.  this way his fellow cheevites can anticipate any new advertisement he might want to publish.

all this hinges on Pauly D's commitment.  it is up to you Dan276.  don't let us down.

*snip*

No, we aren't going to hook these achievements up to the Xbox Live system.

*snip*

Sit back in your recliner

close your eyes

relax

allow the "cheevos" to wash over you

Yes localization should happen at the boundry with the user as really that is its purpose.

I'm glad you mentioned the problem with web applications and not knowing a user's time zone.  Earlier today I quickly had the thought of plumbing the IValueConverter in javascript if demands were made for an HTML UI.  Excellent point. Maybe I should do some thinking on if time zone should be determined or if it should be user provided in all cases. Something to ponder.

We are currently using 3.5.1.  We would love to use 4.5 but there are complexities with some 3rd party dependencies that aren't 4.5 capable. The datetimeoffset from the DB all the way to the UI would be great from what I've read (although in practice I'm not sure how much better than UTC it would be). Unfortunately we have to support back to SQL Server 2005.  2008 was the first version to include that datatype.