We recently launched our video tutorial site for Expression Web Designer. Dustin, our resident graphic artist is pumping out the video tutorials as well as designing the site using the tool. It’s good to have some how to vids from a designers point of view. Watch this site throughout 2007 as he continues to expand the content.
Of course, anyone who has started a company has their own rules and guidelines, so I thought i would add to the meme with my own. My “rules” below aren’t just for those founding the companies, but for those who are considering going to work for them as well.
1. Don’t start a company unless its an obsession and something you love.
2. If you have an exit strategy, its not an obsession.
3. Hire people who you think will love working there.
4. Sales Cures All. Know how your company will make money and how you will actually make sales.
5. Know your core competencies and focus on being great at them. Pay up for people in your core competencies. Get the best. Outside the core competencies, hire people that fit your culture but are cheap
6. An expresso machine ? Are you kidding me ? Shoot yourself before you spend money on an expresso machine. Coffee is for closers. Sodas are free. Lunch is a chance to get out of the office and talk. There are 24 hours in a day, and if people like their jobs, they will find ways to use as much of it as possible to do their jobs.
7. No offices. Open offices keeps everyone in tune with what is going on and keeps the energy up. If an employee is about privacy, show them how to use the lock on the john. There is nothing private in a start up. This is also a good way to keep from hiring execs who can not operate successfully in a (more…)
Say you’re debugging your application and you see that version 1.0 of an assembly is being loaded when you thought it should be version 2.0. Where is the reference to 1.0 coming from?
The easiest way to find out is to look at the Fusion log for this bind. If the version 1.0 assembly was successfully loaded, use the ForceLog/”Log all binds” option of FusLogVw. Then, look for the line in the log showing the calling assembly:
Calling assembly : referencingAssembly, Version=1.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=12ab3bf24c56c45b.
It shows the display name of the calling assembly when available. It doesn’t tell you whether this is a static or a dynamic reference because Fusion doesn’t know or care (that doesn’t matter for binding purposes). So, this could mean that referencingAssembly was built against the other 1.0 assembly, or that it asked for it at runtime via Assembly.Load(), etc.
Sometimes the calling assembly is not specified in the log. There are a few possible cases where that happens:
I am already having a great time at the Windows Server 2008, Visual Studio 2008 and Sql Server 2008 Launch event in LA…
I am gave a very fun session on Visual Studio 2008 for Web Developers… It was fun to pull this together over the last few days (harddrive crash excluded). There is SO much good stuff for web developers in VS2008… From Linq , to CSS\HTML designers , to JavaScript debugging and intellesnse and of course the ASP.NET 3.5 support Ajax (updatePanel , the Ajax control toolkit , JSON based web services, etc).
What is your favorite feature?
If you could not make it to LA, the good news is there are tons of local launch events.. check out the list
Being in the LA convention center brings back all kinds of great memories of PDCs past and makes me look forward to PDC ‘08 !
I am tickled pink ’n honored to announce the third release of Microsoft Tagspace *, a social bookmarking solution for technical professionals, like you. With this release, Tagspace becomes Microsoft’s first true social bookmarking application for the whole World Wide Web Web. Learn more about Tagspace and its potential to help you save, recall, and connect to the people, subjects, and Web-based resources that matter most to you here.
With today’s release, you can now use Tagspace to:
, by clicking on their names and subscribing to the RSS feeds associated with their tagged items lists.
Microsoft’s official support website is http://support.microsoft.com/. It has all kinds of resources like product FAQs, downloads, searchable KB articles, newsgroup pointers, and ways to reach people to help with your individual needs or feedback.
Unfortunately, I can’t give attention to individual customer issues. That’s because I work in product design and development, not customer support. Someone has to be focused on that, or else we’d never ship anything! So, I’m going to have to leave your questions and comments to MS’s official channels which specialize in that. Please keep comments you post here general and about the loader or performance.
I remember the time well. I was 27 years old.
I finally had my own apartment for the first time. I still hadn’t bought a new car yet, but I was jazzed that I had a 4 year old Mazda RX 7. 4 Years old was as good as new to me, and driving a gold RX 7 back in the day was fun as well.
I still bought my suits used, although by then I did have 1 new suit I had bought at Neiman Marcus because my girlfriend worked there and brought me to one of their year end employee discount deals.
My business, MicroSolutions was about 3 years old and I would make 60k dollars that year. HUGE money for me. Back then, getting paid your age was good, double your age
It was a beautiful ring that cost me exactly $ 7,500 dollars.
Long story short. I got engaged. She lost the ring a couple weeks after I gave it to her and before it was insured. We broke up. (the good news is that I was too young to get married and we are still good friends).
27 years old. Zero in the bank. Messed up in the head because of the breakup. The good news was that I had my business. The one thing that I could always focus on to the exclusion of everything else. A trait that would serve me well in business, but had more than a little bit to do with my breakup.
MicroSolutions was growing. But it could be doing better. The PC industry (more…)
I’m a Firefox guy. The only reason I use it instead of IE is that it feels faster. Seriously.
I find it incredibly annoying that the only websites I frequent that require IE are those run by Microsoft. I’ve nothing against IE (I’ve never had the malware problems), but these websites disrupt whatever I’m doing. Most times I’ll just avoid the site. A good example is the MSN Video portion of MSN. Occasionally I’ll click a link leading to a video, at which point I’m told that I can’t watch it in anything but IE. This is odd since 1/2 of the emails I get link to funny videos on websites that do let me watch them in my browser of choice. Instead of l
Which is why I was pleasantly surprised by the following error message. The site doesn’t support Firefox — but they’re working on correcting it. It’s a problem, and they’re fixing it. Bravo!
I have been working on a project lately that was already using the Telerik ASP.NET Rad Controls suite. One of the new features was a fully editable web-grid, so I chose to use the existing ajax-enabled RadGrid control to speed my development. I chose to use a 3rd party control, mostly due to time constraints since the project required a grid with inline-editing, full CRUD operations, plus custom column templates, all with heavy Ajax support to avoid postbacks and excessive page size.
I soon discovered, the Telerik controls are nice tool for simple uses where you can use asp.net DataSource controls and automatic databinding, but not so much if you need to get “fancy” with your implementation. In my case I needed to do 2 things that cross over into the grey area where these controls excel.
First, I’m using an early 2.0 version of NetTiers for the DAL (with Service Layer implementation) with custom mods to the entities as the datasource, and second, I’m doing some aggregate custom ItemTemplates that require custom data-binding.
This lead to extreme complexity in the implementation because, A) this version of NetTiers’ had problems with properly generating CRUD operations for its EntityDataSource controls (NetTiers entities mapped onto a custom ObjectDataSource style control) which prevented me from using the declarative model, and B) the RadGrid control simply sucks if you cannot use automatic databinding and if you require custom databinding logic.
(more…)
Just a note to myself to do a braindump on all this Service Broker shiznit I have been playing with lately.
Potential discussion topics:
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