Comments by Richard Hauer (5 Limes) (Top 5 by date)

What program are you trying to mail merge in? Is it Word? If so could you use a database query file (dqy)? What is "Microsoft mail merge"?

As written in the above suggestion, the value should be 'false'.
I believe you have to set it at the Page level (and not in the masterpage) or I suppose you could create a base class for page if you want to set it globally.
You can set the property in the ASPX file itself by using the @ Page tag thus:

<% @ Page MaintainScrollPositionOnPostback="false" %>

Note that false is the default so you may be setting it to true somewhere already.

same deal - create a dialog with a progressbar. In the dialog's OnLoad call BackgroundWorker to do your work in another thread and set the BackgroundWorker.RunWorkerCompleted event to a method that will close the dialog. You can use BackgroundWorker.ProgressChanged event to report on the progress of the task.

To start running the task simply open the dialog.

I would suggest that rather than trying to teach you something about the real world, your college is following some prescription in a book. In which case rather than learning something useful, they most likely want you to regurgetate something you were supposed to have read. At least that is my experience of college.

That said - the "list" they are expecting is probably in the last chapter of whatever text book you are in the middle of working through. I would re-read that as a first step.

If you are interested in what will happen when you are asked to write a business case for real, once you've left college, re-read my response second.