Still can't find everything on the Internet...

As my friend Paul Wilson points out, sometimes technical answers are really hard to find.  As I browse the ASP.NET and C# newsgroups, weblogs, and Forums, answers abound on how to bind a dataset to a control.  I can find numerous explanations of how .NET garbage collection works, best practices utilizing the dispose pattern, and many other helpful hints.

However, what happens when you are working at the bleeding edge of technology, in an environment you can't replicate on your own PC?  Things get a little more complicated here.  Mainframe programmers are used to these limitations, but this really frustrates windows programmers.  As I type this on my Windows 2003 Server (a laptop), which also easily replicates a clustered Windows 2000 environment using VMWare, I remember that one of the things that made windows a powerhouse in the server room is ease of programming.  I've also got more power at my fingertips than the entire world had in processing power a few decades ago.

Still,, what do you do when you are banging against a problem when you are probably the only person who has ever seen it?  This is often the case when you are working in a Citrix environment, or in my case, Windows Clustering Services, or any other highly expensive environment.

In these cases, internet resources aren't really much help, and a developer doesn't often have direct access to the vendor.  As an open question, what is one to do?

2 Comments

  • Hope you somehow get the solution during a night sleep?



    And ask around a lot and hope someone knows what you're talking about.



    If Google and forums, blogs etc fail, hope is the last thing remaining :)

  • We have multiple Citrix consultants on site, all paid quite nicely, but they seem clueless about development, let alone .NET development. They've said all along they had people running .NET successfully on Citrix, but they've never once bothered to tell us who, even though we've asked repeatedly. They, and everyone else, just keep going over the same mantra about using the proper registry keys and user directories, which have nothing to do with .NET. I would have thought they would be eager to work with us also, especially given the size of our endeavor, but they apparently see themselves more as an O/S add-on, only willing to support configuration. They don't seem to appreciate that software might have issues in their environment that could preclude us from using it possibly.

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