Mark Arteaga

Chris Tacke writes about the downside of running your own company.  I would have too agree with him that it's not all fun especially when you run into clients that don't pay and then you have to pay a lawyer for getting some of the money for a succesfully delivered project.  That's the current situation he is running into...and since there will be probably 0% chance that they will get paid for the work done and since the client is already selling the product commercially he's trying a little experiment by using Google and it's ranking system.  Is it the right thing to do?  I don't know i have never been put in that situation...but if someone owed me $12.5k I think I would do the same.  Maybe he should sell it to competitors...since they didn't pay for the source then technically they don't own it.

Anyway here's a snip directly from his blog entry...should help in the google rankings

<snip>
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.
</snip>

Here is the final version of the article I am writting for MSDN.  I have also included the sample application here.  I welcome all commets

UPDATE: Get the final article here

I'm writing an article for MSDN on designing your PPC application for stylus-free usage using Windows Mobile 5.0 and VS.NET 2005.  I'm still not 100% done but I'm posting this to see if anyone has anything of interest they would like covered about this topic or if there are any comments on what I have so far.  I mainly have introduction right now but will go through a sample application to demonstrate one-handed operation.

A couple of months ago I started creating a socket wrapper to make creating socket connections a little easier.  Yesterday, I started working on it again and came across a 'bug' when setting the ReceiveBufferSize.  I wanted to make the SendBufferSize and ReceiveBufferSize changeble by the user. Here is the code:

// Set these socket options
this.tcpClient.SendBufferSize = this.sendBufferSize;
this.tcpClient.ReceiveBufferSize = this.receiveBufferSize;

The error returned when setting ReceiveBufferSize was "An unknown, invalid, or unsupported option or level was specified in a getsockopt or setsockopt call"

Upon further investigation (and with help from Sandeep P.) by searching getsockopt and setsockopt from the error message I came accross this:

So, basically Windows CE only supports setting the ReceiveBufferSize if you are using Datagrams (or UDP) and since I'm using TCP .NETCF throws the error.  It's not really an bug, but something not supported by the underlying OS (Windows CE) which VS.NET2005 IDE let's you see using IntelliSense. Don't get me wrong IntelliSense has been greatly improved for Compact Framework (see here) and TCPClient.ReceiveBufferSize I'm sure is rarely used.

So if you're doing some socket programming on a device be aware of this.  8K of buffer size should be big enough, but just be aware of this when using TCPClient.  

Note: On the desktop setting ReceiveBufferSize does not throw an exception. 

I upgraded to dasBlog 1.8 so comments are enabled again since 1.7+ of dasBlog uses CAPTCHA for comments.  I know CAPTCHA can be beat but hopefully this will stop some of the crap coming.  Lately I've also been getting tonnes of trackback garbage so that is still disabled for now.

Check out this article by Joel Spolsky on Good Programmers vs. Cheap Programmers.  He goes through some of the reasons why software companies (not IT shops) need top notch developers/programmers to be successful and most importantly profitable.  Also, check out Eric Sink's related article (written in 2003) on why you need developers and not programmers (again, geared towards ISVs).  I think programmer and developer are interchangeable, but Eric defines what is a developer is (someone who contributes in multiple ways) and what a programmer is (someone who only writes code and sometimes fixes bugs and doesn't do much else).

Alex Yakhnin has created a RSS library called Y.A.R.F.  Looks pretty cool and hopefully i can take it for a spin!

I have disabled comments here because i've been wasting too much time cleaning up my blog from these f*#*ing spammers.  Hopefully i'll enable again once i upgrade my dasBlog to the latest version which will help reduce some of the crap!

OpenNETCF Smart Device Framework v1.4 was released today!  Download, install and give feedback either via bugs or via the sdf-dev@netcf.tv mailing list.