My friend and colleague Kevin Powick recently posted a help wanted ad for consulting work: 30-40 hours per week at $35/hour over a period of about six months. One way to look at this is that for someone who doesn’t have a job that’s over $25,000 that they didn’t have before. Some people who charge more for their services consider this to be an indignant slap. I’m fascinated by the thought processes on both sides.
In the U2 forum there have been a couple questions on the new U2/DB2 .NET data provider from IBM. I thought I’d write up a couple quick notes.
I was writing a note to the Google QA department via their webpage to ask for better filtering for specific kind of trash results. Having some experience with custom searches and filtering it occurred to me that everything I was asking them for I could probably just do myself. As they say, if you want a job done right… OK, I’m going to start a little (?) pet project to create a better search engine using the Google API and freely available resources.
Microsoft continues their effort to reduce the amount of code required for C# developers to accomplish certain tasks. The more I see of this the more I want. Somewhere between where we are now and the point where the system reads our minds and just does what we want, there is a place where guys like me can get the system to deal with housekeeping that’s time consuming and boring to code. I’m looking for that place…
In my last blog I mentioned there really isn’t such a thing as "The Linux Desktop". The topic was mentioned in a forum today so I thought I’d post a follow-up with some related thoughts and hallucinations - you can decide which is which. I apologize if this posting isn’t organized very well. I’m blasting this one out quickly and thoughts don’t always come in nicely organized paragraphs. 
Dawn made a comment in comp.databases.pick: "I like to say that "it takes hard work to make software simple". That triggers a thought: as software evolves and user expectations increase it takes a lot more work to keep it simple. I don’t think some of my colleagues have embraced this concept.
We’ve been putting together an ASP.NET starter kit which may or may not be productized. It’s a Visual Studio solution / template which includes the following features.
As I’m sitting here tidying up some CSS in a new ASP.NET app, I thought I’d provide a couple tips that I’ve found to be helpful.
One of the most common inquiries we see in MV forums involves exchanging data between the MV DBMS and relational databases. In this multi-part series over the next couple weeks, I’ll describe ways to get data flowing in both directions without using platform-specific ODBC tools.
This Part 1 is just an introduction and I’ll start describing some details in Part 2. I expect a new segment on this every 4 days or so, maybe with other blog postings in between.
Questions frequently arise in forums about how FlashBASIC works. So I thought I’d summarize it here.
First, a primer on compilation and object code in general