My previous lives have left me pretty handy with C#. I only really used .net 1.1 for serious heavy lifting, so I'm finding all kinds of nice suprises (like generics - strongly typed ArrayLists at last!) in .net 3.5 now that I've started using Visual Studio 2008 (and finding that the free Express Edition is fine for commercial development came as a rather nice suprise too!).
One of the big down sides with the whole Microsoft ecosystem is the cost of getting off the ground, so as a startup we are going down a pretty standard open source tool route (i.e. LAMP servers). However, we have some fairly sophisticated spidering to be done to get structured data from a fairly large number of web sites of widely varying quality, so in the interests of getting up and running quickly, I've developed the spider in C# (with a fairly massive leg-up from Jeff Heaton - thanks Jeff!). I need to get the spidered data back into MySQL so that our other applications can use it, which brings me to today's problem.
