Discussions

Actually it's 1.21 Gigawatts of power...

My work machine

Dell Insprion 9100 ( one of the last P4 Laptops from Dell before they switched to the underwelming Pentium M's ), has had its native XP professional with its service packs for over 1 year now.

My home machine, a unit I built from cobbled together parts, has had my retail version of 2000 professional, and recently a retail version of XP professional on it. Though I regularly zorch the software loadout and re-install just to make it have that like new performance characteristic once again ( like every 3 months or so )

I just this weekend, bought a new HP with a Pentium D V//V. It came shipped with Media Edition XP though I may just put my XP professional license on it because I can, since I paid 300 for the retail version. The XP that shipped with the HP is tied to a 8 gig hidden partition that will force me to spend the 2 days cleaning out all the extra garbage that ships with these machines....

Example

A 60 day trial version of Office 2003 ( Get that crap out'a here I have a license of the real thing )

A 45 day version of Nortans Antivirus/Internet security. Sure I bough a fast machine just so that thing could bring it to its knees.

Every version of Every ISP's warze clogging my machines arteries
AOL... Gonzo
EarthLink.... Bye Bye
Netscape.... See ya
MSN....  Flush...

All the rest of the trial ware removed

 just so I can get my clean slate back.

Heh!

Very nice....

I can still hear the chant EXTERMINATE! EXTERMINATE! heh

While it is most certainly an absurd parody on the state of development affairs, some of the items depicted ring with a hint of truth. That fact is what makes the thing so funny and memorable. Definitely effective with its delivery.

To start off our company is attempting to broaden its development horizons by becoming as proficient in C# as we are already in VB.NET. With that we have been running across a number of issues that I wanted to see if anyone else out there is having and what if any workaounds exist or more likely what we are doing wrong.

First
Has anyone else out there seen or experianced the Visual Studio forms designer in C# projects just arbritrarily munging the placement of controls at run time when in design time there they sit right where we put em. Note we are being carefull NOT to touch the forms designer generated code only touching the one place in the constructors where we are supposed to put our own code.

Second and perhaps more perplexing
We have a project defined class template with some properties. like so

namespace ProjectX
{
    public class clsMember {
        public clsMember()
        {
        }

        // Main Member Data
        string _bsuNumber = "";
        string _cisNumber = "";

        public string BSUNumber {
            get {return this._bsuNumber;}
            set {this._bsuNumber = value;}
        }

        public string CISNumber {
            get {return this._cisNumber;}
            set {this._cisNumber = value;}
        }
     }
}

Now we have this class in our projects next we might want to use this class within some form class so we define an instance at the form level like so...

static clsMember _member;

Next within the some method inside the form we might want to use the class so we do something like this
public SomeMethod()
        {
           
            _member = new clsMember();

          // do something to fill the class with stuff

          // here we want to use the thing
          
           
            this.txtMemberBSU.Text = _member.BSUNumber;
            this.txtMemberCIS.Text = _member.CISNumber;
                            
        }


Our problem is that the Intellesense on Visual Studio does not show us the public interface on the _member instance of clsMember. It is valid as if I remeber the exact case formatting for the member methods I can certainly code the thing up but Visual Studio's helper functionality is not working as it always does in a VB.Net project.

I can't help but feel the we are just missing something. Or perhaps we have structured the thing incorrectly. So I figured I would petition the SME Gods for a sign.

Let the Flames begin...

Thanks

At our place we installed the thing and tested it with all our inhouse developed apps. Not a single issue was uncovered so we rolled it out to the field.

I would say go for it..

From a desktop perspective its definately in the 95-98 windows era though the power of what possible there in linux is light years ahead. Unlocking that power for the average users is not easy or really possible for them without coaching and effort from someone in the know.

Now from a server and infrastructure perspective. The linux platform is definately on the par and in some case well above the stability of your current Microsoft offerings.  Perhaps not AS feature laden but stability wise definately on the par or greater. (I NEVER touch my Linux machines running  the few things we have here but do manage to spend some quality time on our internal microsoft servers). I can have this stability with a single machine running most everything on Linux whereas stability on a windows server platform usually means not asking it to do to much. Limiting the tasks for a piece of server hardware limits is interaction surface between tasks and thus increases that uinits stability and relaibility.

From a security standpoint I do feel that microsoft has made tremendous strides over the past year XPSP2 not withstanding. But the fact remains that as long as Microsoft is on TOP they will be the target of choice for the malcontents and general 'bubble gum on the bottom of your shoe' types out there. This is a simple fact and while security seems to be high on a well administered Linux system I feel that is largely due to this less enticing target status. Regardless of the reason though an admin must monitor each platform and react accordingly. Dealing with security on a Linux platform seems to be less of a chore for whatever reason.

From a development standpoint. Linus development is definately not as polished, Visual Studio is da BOMB. C# is a better java than java, .Net Rocks. Of course there is Mono in the Linux camps ( Mono also works well on Windows folks ) and for webservice work in SOA setups Mono on Linux makes for a killer setup. But the development platform where, for the developer anyways, the Rubber meets the road, Visual studio is the only way to go.

At work...

I being the Boss there usually try to get folks to NOT use what I call Cartoony mode of windows XP. I do however respect the others desire to exert some control and wish to find their own path in these matters so I let them do what they want.

Personally I revert back to classic mode myself and for my profile on the testbeds and what not.

Frankly most of our clients run windows 2k as the highest level of windows in their setups and In demo mode I believe that our clients have a slightly elevated comfort level when we are demoing applications and other bits in to them if the theme is in classic mode. That is likely to change slowly though from here onward...

Of course Windows did not have a lock on wacked out error messages and status dialogs. Does anyone out there remember the machine could show this message...

END TASK, Didn't