As a software developer, I've often wrestled with the decision of how much to price my creation. I remember watching my grandfather create a large, beautiful watercolor painting and then stick a price tag of $10,000 on it. When asked how he could justify $10k in 3 hours his answer was it took him 40 years + 3 hours. That makes sense.

It would be nice if this would apply to software development, because I'd be at 20 years mark!. Since it doesn't work that way, try reading this article on how to compute a price, all the time keeping your revenue in mind.

The Intermountain Venture Forum will be held on October 6th & 7th in Boise Idaho. Fifteen companies will present in front of the top institutional investors in the West. In addition, there will be several panels from leading experts in venture funding, angel investment, and how to sell to the government.

Here is the Web site and agenda.

Been doing some coding this weekend and, in keeping with good TDD practice, I've been writing my tests, albeit paper-based exercises for the users, as I'm writing the code.

I found this good resource: www.testdriven.com -- check out their list of TDD Tools

It seems that Google is breaking one of Philisophical tenants. It seems that Google/China is omitting sites from the Chinese government banned sites. This article exposes the tests and possible reasons.

Had a student point this out last week. Newsmap is an application that visually reflects the constantly changing landscape of the Google News aggregator. Personally, I think it's a bit busy but interesting.

Ok, I'm a couple of days late on this one, but since I recommend it to all of my friends, clients, and students, I thought I should post this advisory and patch.

Just wanted to list a few resources here:

• Compaq R3000Z (64bit laptop) - Only $824 for a base unit!
• www.route64.net - even though it's over, looks like a good site

As you may know, .NET Framework 1.1 has a service pack out now.

I've been reading a few notes about installing it.

• I've heard that it breaks SourceGear Vault
• But then I've heard that it doesn't

Also, there appears to be a problem w/ the client-side JAVASCRIPT file. If you've upgraded to .NET FW 1.1 SP1, you'll need to copy the old "WebUIValidation.js" into your IIS \aspnet_client\system_web\1_1_4322 folder. This is the old file before the SP1 update and your web app should work as usual now. Here is the thread that mentioned about the workaround.

http://channel9.msdn.com/ShowPost.aspx?PostID=21650

Microsoft and Netdesk have partnered to run several ISV tours throughout the US over the next couple of months.

• Building Connected Systems Today
• Enhancing your Applications with Windows Server 2003

I'll be personally delivering the W2003 tour. Hope to see you on the trail!

Wow, you really can do everything with Google. Here's a blog entry from a guy who wrote an API in Linux to turn your Google GMail account into a mountable file system.

Wish me luck -- I'm off to install the Client/App/Data components to VSTS TFS in *one* VHD image.

My first snag, was seeing a weird !"ValueType mismatch" error that I couldn't explain, so I did some research. Well, now that IIS 6.0 now has 1.1 and 2.0 versions of the framework, and Sharepoint doesn't work, until you set both of the sites back to version 1.1. Do a restart of the server too, for good measure.

The next speed bump occurred when I was actually installing the software, and specified my local machine as being the database server, at which point I was presented with a dialog reading “Cannot install database server on the local machine. Please enter a remote machine name instead“:

The workaround was to specify 127.0.0.1 as the name of the server, rather than RESEARCH (my local machine name)

I was commenting the other day that many TLAs at Microsoft are getting way too many meanings. Case in point, WSS, which can mean one of many things in this world, even with Microsoft technologies.

At least they honestly acknowledge this.

I love everything about Office 2003, except for the fact that Photo Editor is gone and the (ahem) replacement, is far from what I need. The good news is that you can just re-install the old editor from your Office XP media.

Microsoft's official explanation is here and there's an independent analysis here.

If you want to download the latest .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 1, then click here:

Beware of other versions of the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta 1's out there. The one above is dated late July, not June.

A student of mine pointed this out today. Leave it to a C++ programmer to know all the platform tips and tricks.

PINVOKE.NET addresses the difficulty of calling Win32 or other unmanaged APIs in managed code (languages such as C# and VB .NET). It even includes the complex structure definitions, where applicable.

www.pinvoke.net

Thanks to Bob Beauchemin for pointing out this great paper on Batch Compilation, Recompilation, and Plan Caching Issues in SQL Server 2005.

It's available from MSDN subscription downloads

You may know my feeling on SqlCommandBuilder, but on those days you're feeling lazy ...

  Dim cmdNW As New SqlCommand
  cmdNW.Connection = conNW
  cmdNW.CommandType = CommandType.StoredProcedure
  cmdNW.CommandText = "Employee Sales by Country"
  SqlCommandBuilder.DeriveParameters(cmdNW)

Ok, so you're aware of the standard kinds of items that you can plug into your USB drive, such as:

• USB hard drives, floppy drives, etc.
• Flash memory drives
• Phone chargers
• Mice

But, here's a list of some rather interesting things that I've come across lately:

• Air Purifier
• Alarm Clock
• Ashtray
• Beverage Warmer
• Christmas Tree
• Fan
• Grill (George Forman)
• Heating Pad
• Massage
• Noodle Strainer
• Massage Ball
• Toothbrush (Japanese) 
• Vacuum Cleaner

And if those weren't strange enough:

• One for the ladies (adult)

”Keep one of two things backed up -- your data or your resume.”

- Richard Hundhausen, MCDBA

I'll be adding to this list throughout my journey with the Beta 2

• XQuery Designer
• IntelliSense is not implemented for T-SQL Editors
• Database Diagrams / Visual DB Tools
• Date, Time, and UTCDateTime data types
• Service Manager icon in the System Tray

Dropped altogether

• ObjectSpaces (until Longhorn timeframe)

Any others you want to mention?