My last post, Learn a new language every year?, talked about warping my mind with new languages and how much more C# coding I've been doing lately.

I was in Quebec earlier this week working on an EF project with a .NET architect. The application was in C#.

As we explored various tweaks to the application, I found myself working on the keyboard that had been hooked up to the computer in the conference room. Although the keyboard was a standard English keyboard, it was programmed for Canadian French. This means that although the keyboard had the quote (") where I expected it, pressing that key did not give me a quote ("). Instead I had to press shift-2, which the keyboard indicated would give me an at (@) sign. I never did figure out how to get the @ sign, so I just copied and pasted that from elsewhere.

So here I was coding in C# which is still not 100% natural to me, and getting accustomed to finding the quote and even the back slash (/) which was Shift-3 (should be #).The ones that I just could not get used to, which I needed the most were the curly braces ( { and } ). So ever time I needed them, I would take my hands away from the keyboard, look helplessly at Vincent who would lean over and type in the curly braces for me so I could continue on my merry way.