"What other people do about these issues I don't know." Work in a shop that's acquired a lot of Microsoft knowledge. With a very distrusting attitude. The la

"What other people do about these issues I don't know." Work in a shop that's acquired a lot of Microsoft knowledge. With a very distrusting attitude. The last major MS ecosystem project I worked on was with a big MS fan, during his college summers he'd worked on Internet Explorer back when it was getting to be much better than Netscape. And turned down a full time offer from them for more of the same to work on his brother's company. But circa 1997 he was not willing to trust SQL Server as it was then with the company's fate when it was time to move from the superb Access Jet database engine, and I suggested and implemented IBM's DB2 as a 1/2 price alternative to Oracle (biggest issue was no MVCC, but that was OK for a tight knit group of programmers; the sysadmin and DBA job was in turn easier than Oracle's long evolved mess). Fortunately never had to go back after that, and prior to that I learned Windows 3.0 though NT 3.51 the hard way, back when that wasn't a nightmare. NT 3.51 SP2 or so was when it started going to hell). I made Windows GUIs work by starting with a sample program that worked, and carefully mutating and checking for viability each step. Used SoftICE to debug the hard stuff. Built a stunningly good system using Microsoft's implementation of DCE RPC (the alternative to Sun's haphazard stuff). But as I note the stuff outside of my code kept getting better and better. Oh, did I say in that last job that MS's Visual C++ STL library wasn't thread safe? On a naively multi-threaded system, that I used with 2 CPUs until 2002? Bleah. You've learned a lot of stuff, but the price sounds like it's too high unless you're going to continue in this ecosystem, and I'm advising all my friends to leave it. Especially with the new CEO, who very possibly has serious damaged its existing QA system without replacing it with something better (rather like one of the causes of the 2nd part of the Vista nightmare). And, yeah, SQL is GREAT. Just helped a friend with a project using PostgreSQL ... and its doc is great, like IBM's for Windows and UNIX(TM) back then, and Oracle's in the 1994-2001 time frame. Get some books by the greats, like C.J. Date, and you will have oodles of fun.