I like the article you link to a lot, in part because I disagree with large parts of your argument (sorry :) ).

I feel like maintenance, in general, is a lot harder than development from ground. What’s hard with new developments is getting the specifications right, then getting the architecture right. While there is definitely a need for skilled architects, these do not tend to be the same people that do the actual development (in large companies, anyway).

So you have skilled software engineers that do the architecture, and others that do the development. And the actual programming is not that hard.

I am personally absolutely sure that reading someone else’s code is a lot harder than writing code from scratch, for a variety of reasons:

- It’s basically not taught in school
- You need to understand the intent of the code from what’s there, and in case of debugging work out how the actual code differs from the intent (in your own code you already know the intent)
- Reading code requires a more extensive knowledge of the programming language that writing it (if I only know 5% of Perl and avoid regular expressions because I don’t know them, I can still get by and write a Perl program. If I need to debug a program that’s been written by a Perl programmer that put regular expressions everywhere, I just have to know them).

This last point is linked to the “becoming a better programmer.” I spent quite a bit of time working within the Linux kernel a long time ago, and I know for a fact I learnt a lot of C from it.

And this brings me to my last point: anyone can write new code and make a small application (say, a thousand lines).With a good architect munching the work for you, you’ll be just putting a bunch of thousand-line programs together. However, finding a bug in a 2-millions line program (like the Linux kernel) is a whole different story.

Out of my programming experience, the success that I remember most was finding a bug in Linux, whereby “once every few days the clock goes back a minute or so.” (wtf?, is the normal first reaction.) Next in line was finding a bug in a Linux driver using an oscilloscope and good sight. Only after that do I rank full new applications, most new development being still boring and pedestrian anyway.

So, giving maintenance projects to poor programmers? I don’t know that’s a actually a good idea. On the other hand I will agree that maintenance and debugging have a generally bad reputation, but I reckon it’s mostly because it’s harder. Or that’s what we should tell people anyway to get new recruits ;)

PS . Nice new haircut!

The problem is as Pocket Pc uses Unicode character set but the Shapelib library uses Ascii character set.So whenever any shapelib library function is called by passing unicode character set it throws error.

My question is there any shapelib library which supports unicode character set

“the Windows directory of the emulator”

I am not able to find any such directory in my machine.Is it the same Windows directory in which Operating system files there or some other directory