Chris S

Davil, If you're shying away from the MS products because of cost, you can use both Visual C# Express and SQL Server Express for free.

I keep getting conflicting answers to a question I thought would be simple, but I'm getting conflicting responses. Is the http header (specifically any attached http variables) encrypted along with the content? I've heard everything from "Yes they are", to "No they aren't -- otherwise the server wouldn't know how to handle the message", to "Most are encrypted except for a few in clear text, mainly things like type of encrption used, encoding type, etc." Can anyone on here elaborate?

VS 2008 for .NET Development I use Edit Plus a lot for basic editing and recording macros for mass editting. When I was going back and forth between Windows and Unix, I used to use SlickEdit.

Consoles: 360, Wii, DS Lite, 2600 Gaming/Development: E8500 (Core 2 Duo 3.16) Asus P5Q MB Radeon HD 4850 512MB 8GB Mushkin DDR2 800 OCZ 64GB SSD & WD Raptor Windows Server 2008 24" Dell & 23" Apple CD diNovo Keyboard w/ mx1000 mouse

I've been developing software for about 10 years now professionally, and have owned my own consulting company for about 6. I do pretty well, and have some high profile Fortune 500 clients, but if it's any consolation, just about every time a new technology comes out, even it's just an advancement in a technology I'm already very proficient at, I just about always get overwhelmed. The first thing I ask myself is, "Holy shit, is this the stuff that's going to make me obsolete like the assem & cobol peeps I make fun of and get overrun by all the young guys out there?" But so far, I just sit down and set aside time to learn, and after awhile it just becomes second nature. Digip is absolutely right; we never stop learning, which is true of most professions like accountants, doctors, lawyers, etc., but maybe even moreso in our industry because things change so fast. I haven't done java professionally for a couple of years (mainly do C#), but if I wanted to pick up a project in it, I'd definitely be rusty and have to spend the time to get up to speed. So don't get discouraged, just practice, and there's plenty of resources to ask for help when you need it. I still buy books for new techs, but really Google has become the best reference for researching/finding answers to any coding questions I have for currently and/or mainsteam technologies. You said you were out of highschool, not sure if you mentioned college, but I'd highly recommend going to a 4yr college in CS if you were really serious about software development as a profession.

lol, being a noob on here I didn't want to come out and say it like that...but yeah....I second that.

"Did you hear Earth just got pwned?"

It's not that one is necessarily better, it depends on what you're doing. If you're talking about enterprise business software, or even smaller web applications, you'd never consider C++ over C#. C# has almost 30 years of programming language and software engineering advancements over C++, so it's going to be a more robust language for the overwhelming amount of tasks. For example, there's much more concensus on development standards, and a lot of this was built into standard APIs vs. the C++ community having to develop versions of patterns to answer software programming delimas as they have come up. For that, and a number of other issues, it's facilitates much more managable code, and provides better tools to encapsulate business and data logic into maintenable tiers. Certainly you can do anything you can do in C# in C++, but you can make the argument that you don't need a remote control because you can get up and turn on the TV by hand.

Why not just use SSL for the login?

Not sure if you're looking at C# specifically for desktop development, or for web application development, but www.asp.net is a good place to stay up to date on the latest developments and has a lot of great video tutorials.