Problem with being an international forum is that most of us are unaware of
conventions and semantics in countries other than our own. All the guys in
my department thought the reply to be offensive.
Perhaps the fault is ours and we are oversensitive. However, any employee in
our company that replies to a genuine message in the manner that Phil did,
would be reprimanded by management.
I'd hate to say it, but I don't see how Phill's response was offensive
either, remember on the internet you must take things in the best
possible way, as written words are much harder to show emotional
context cues. I will offer you a few words of advice though, since
technical newsgroups act a bit different than most things:
First, unless you see a [MSFT] after our name, none of us are paid to
be here, we all volunteer. Being volunteers, we expect people to
present their problems in a way that makes it easy for us to look at
and solve. For example many "newbies" post complain that there code is
throwing an exceptions, but don't list the code or the exception.
Similarly, your post mentioned you had an "event called RefreshData
(Public Event Refresh)" which due to a typo made a very confusing
post. My approach was to ignore your post (I don't spend time on what
I can't understand). Phill's approach was to ask for clarification of
the post.
Second, if you don't say you aren't a new programmer, we will probably
treat you like one until we know otherwise. In other words, don't feel
bad if we talk to you like a beginner programmer, it's not an insult,
it's a precaution on our end to prevent mass confusion if the OP is un-
knowledgeable.
Third, never, ever reply rudely to a post, even if the original post
was found rude. In worst cases this will lead to a flame war,
something you don't want to participate in. In other cases (like
replying harshly to a regular) it cause your post be ignored by other
regulars and not get answered (or land you in a kill file if you were
very mean). Either way, a harsh reply to a lingual misunderstanding
(if that's what it was) is not worth getting yourself ignored.
Also, if you remove all the cursed (imo) "Handles ...." lines from
your class and just use AddHandler in the class constructor to wire up
the events will everything work?
Thanks,
Seth Rowe