Well it came up in some port code from another language so it defiantly isn't an every day occurrence.

The problem is if you store some opaque data as say an object reference. Then make explicit cast accessors to get at the object as some value type. If you then call a mutator on the valuetype, you change a temporary version that was made for the cast instead of the underlying object.

Regardless porting c++ to c# is rife with all sorts of nice gems. Properties have the same issue in this specific case.

... Value types, these are structs that are not wrapped in an object
yeah these can get "fun" with auto boxing and properties

... Platform-invoke allows developers to call native code without having to write any glue in C++ using JNI, it can all be done in the managed language.
no support on the phone for this

... Unsafe code (pointers) to support C++, Cobol and Fortran compilers running on the CLI
not on the phone eaither

.. Native support for talking to COM-based APIs. Although mostly Windows-specific, its used to talk to Mozilla, VirtualBox and OpenOffice APIs in Linux.
not on the phone

... Covariance and contravariance introduced with .NET 4 make even more generic cases a pleasure to use.
sorta nice but you don't get the cut and paste power of c++ templates. Also the phone is locked at some bastardized version of 3.. you don't get many of the 4 features. This may possibly change in the future.

Another benefit of for is they've made a dynamic invocation system, so at runtime you can intercept function lookups, which will be pretty nifty for making scripting languages. Again the phone is lacking this atm.

http://www.google.com/patents?vid=USPAT7251653 From what I can derive from the claims. They patented database stored views? They do have the magic wort Piviot in there.. whatever that means. All I can derive from the pivot table is, its another table defined by table data. Not like every database in existence is implemented this way already.

MM I get gmail in Thunderbird so that line of thinking doesn't seem to lineup.

[rambling] For one thing making a game is way more involved then making a website. There are lots of opportunities to work with algorithms (AI being a big one). Usually games don't have much of a framework to work with, as compared to say business apps. So you're left to devising your own systems for data and organization, which I feel is good for learning. The frameworks that are out there will give you nice easy hardware access; which is more gentle then it used to be. As someone mentioned above, making UIs can be a killer, its freaking tedious and in the real world usually you have a designer for this. Although some people have this skill some what naturally, usually programmers end up making the most simple ugly UI possible that is functional, but not obvious to anyone but them. [/rambling]

And how many patents does the implementation of PNG infringe on? That is the problem with patents.

Basiclly if you put it in for free, they may use it they may not. If the kid needed it later they'd try to find it. We opted for that but there wasn't enough in the cord anyway so it was all moot.

I don't think taxing heath care is leaving it intact.