The downside of running your own company

This is an interesting blog entry by one of the leading authorities on .NETCF development - Chris Tacke.

Here he is talking about how one client has played them down for $ 12,500. Wow! The client has taken thier goodwill for a ride. And he is trying to counter this by creating bad press for the client. Here is what he's got to say in his blog entry called The downside of running your own company


Are you looking for mobile software for a Pest Control or Pest Management business? Something that your field technicians can use while in the field to quickly update the status of traps, bait, etc.? How about an application that synchronizes back to an enterprise server so your pest management data can be stored globally for quick reporting as well as updating the technician's daily schedule and routing? Well I suggest you choose anything other than the ePM Solution from Eye-On Solutions of 4720 Montgomery Lane, Bethesda, Maryland (headquartered in Pittsburgh, PA). Josh Roberts, the President of Eye-On Solutions, LLC had the application developed and is selling it, yet paid nothing for it - essentially stealing it from OpenNETCF Consulting, a company who also developed the SDF.

Choose any of their competitors you'd like. Start at the IPMRC for general information or purchase from Insight Direct, PestPAC or anyone else in Pest Control Magazine. I just ask that you do not purchase any product or service from Eye-On Solutions. Thank you.


I posted that snippet here because this is a very real danger that independent software contractors face. We take up to do projects for clients and along the way, you assume that you have a trusted relationship going on, so you release all the source code to the client, hoping they will accept it and release the payments, and they make a run with your work!

I guess the only way to avoid such situations is to work through 3rd party intemediataries and by placing the contract amount in an escrow. This way you are assured of the money if you finish the job properly. The downsize is probably you will have to foot the escrow charges. But I guess that is the cost of doing business.

I have worked through several escrows. But after a while and you build up the trust you can work directly with the client. But even then, I prefer to work on a weekly or bi-weekly schedule, where I release work done in iterations and get paid for that, minimizing the risk of not getting paid at the end.

Good Luck Chris. I hope that you manage to get your money!

Exiting or Closing a .NETCF application

For the better part of today I was trying to get the Form.Close() event of my applications' main form to get fired. But no matter what it seemed to not to get fired. And in the process of trying to figure out why it was not so, I found out a thing or two as well.

1. You should not use the Application.Exit() method to close the application. This makes the app to terminate the execution and return control to the system. ow you may say, that it is what you needed to do. But the bad part is this will not trigger the Close() or Closing() methods and hence the clean-up code is not performed. Also, if you have manually put any procs to execute in either of these events then they will not get executed.

So I changed from Application.Exit() this.Close(). But, still my Closing() event was not getting fired. So I delved further and discovered this. In .NETCF apps, the MinimizeBox property of the form is set to True by default. This is done to enhance the app performances. So this way, when the user clicks on the X button on the Top, the form is minimized. And hence, is the form is called again, it is being called from the memory; improving application performance. This is good in mos cases where you want the application to remain in the memory once it is loaded. But in cases where you want the application to quit, when closed, this is not good behavior. So what you have to do is to set the MinimizeBox property to False. Then the X on top righthand corner of the form will change into a OK. And clicking OK will actually quit the application.

Here is my code sample asking the user to confirm exiting application etc.

if (MessageBox.Show("Do you want to Exit the application?", "Confirm", MessageBoxButtons.YesNo, MessageBoxIcon.Question, MessageBoxDefaultButton.Button2) == DialogResult.Yes)
{
//Do whatever needs to be done.
this.Close();
}
else
e.Cancel = true; //This prevents the form from being closed.


Well, hope this helps someone out there.

Codezone

Found a cool new site on a blue Monday morning: codezone. Hope this will keep me busy. Seems a cool site. I hope it will keep me uptodate with the latest in MS world. I need to get my hands dirty with some coding today.

Tech.ED 2005 Sri Lanka

Ayubowan!

Learn.. Solve.. Grow.. was the theme.

Today was the end of the first ever Tech.Ed in Sri Lanka. Overall the sessions were good. The speakers were very good and delivered the stuff pretty well. I suppose everyone would have enjoyed the sessions and would have learned at least one thing new.

I for one, found a almost all of the sessions that I attended pretty interesting and informative. I managed to gather the an overall picture of the capabilities of the .NET 2.0, specially new enhancements and capabilities towards developing for mobile devices. I picked up pointers on where I need to concentrate.

But to be honest, I found that I was aware of most of the things they were telling. So I guess I was not so bad in terms of keeping up. Importantly, I know what I can do new with VS.NET 2005 and I am looking forward to that.

Learn I did. Solve I look forward to. Grow, will come along naturally!

Get well soon -Wifee!

My sweetie went through a laparoscopy operation on Thursday to remove her Gallbladder because there were stones in it. It is so sad to see her with those four cuts on the tummy and in pain with limited mobility. It breaks my heart to seee her in any kind of pain. I hope you'd get well soon and come back to normalcy, SOON! I wish you a speedy recovery.

Love ya!