So I was going through my office the other day and accumulated a small pile of stuff, which included a full copy of Studio 2003 Pro still in the box.  Of course I could eBay it all, but what fun is that?  I'm thinking I need to have some sort of competition or giveaway or something.  I don't want to go through the hurdles of our last competition, so I'm up for ideas.  What should I do with it all?

Sorry, couldn't resist the pun.  Here's an article I did for .NET Developer's Journal this month.  It's a peek at what I've been working on the last couple months.

My wife and I head to Vegas in the morning for MEDC and a little R&R.  It'll be nice to get a break to recharge from a very hectic last 6 months (though things are still going better than for Neil it appears).

Once I'm back I'll post some stuff on what I've been up to lately as well as some status info on the long awaited SDF 1.3 (it's good news, I promise).

OpenNETCF has a budget of about zero.  We've paid for absolutely no marketing whatsoever, so any “market awareness” is purely by word of mouth and search engine results. 

So tonight I got to wondering, many compaies pay thousands for search engine ranking and hire teams to better themselves.  I wonder how we're faring. Here are the results from some quick Google tests.  I list the search term and the placement we got:

Compact Framework : #2
Compact Framework Code : #1 (beating Microsoft even)
Compact Framework Samples : #15 (surprisingly low based on the last 2)
.NET Mobile : Not in first 50 (though DePaul University has a CF course, neat!)
Managed Code Mobile : #49
Pocket PC VB : #12
Pocket PC C# : #28
Pocket PC Managed : not in top 50
CE Managed Code : #7
Compact Framework Consulting : #4

So it seems that we've got pretty good placement for what I'd think are common search terms. I'd love to see higher ranking on some, but it seems we're getting more than we pay for.

A transmission rate of 10 Mbps implies that each bit is sent in 0.1 microseconds. For a coaxial cable, the speed at which the signal travels along the cable is approximately 0.77 times the speed of light (3.0E8 m/s). A bit therefore occupies 23 meters of cable. That means the smallest frame would be 13.3 km long.

For those who no longer use 10-baseT and gave up coax for twisted pair years ago, propagation speed in twisted pair is much slower - roughly 0.59 times the speed of light.  I'll let you do the math for a frame.

So I'm in the process of writing a couple classes that wrap a stream interface driver.  Specifically I'm writing a class for a PCA9555I2C chip, which inherits from a generic I2C class that inherits from the StreamInterfaceDriver class.  I come the the Read function and I realize that as the data parameter I have to pass a byte array, but the actual driver I'm talking to wants this to be a structure.  To make it more fun the structure contains a pointer to a byte array, so the struct is 16 bytes, 4 of which are a pointer to an array of unmanaged data.

To make a long story short, I ended up writing a new Read function in the I2C class that hides the base version so I can manage the unmanaged data.  Well I then needed to call the FileEx.ReadFile function, which needs a port handle.  The handle is a private member of StreamInterfaceDriver - oops, guess I didn't consider this in my original base class design.  Fortunately the SDF is shared source, so time from bug detection to when the publicly available code was fixed (making it protected) was about 2 minutes. 

If you've got customers concerned about using 3rd-party libraries I'd think examples like this would help ease their fears.

Another personality preview for those bored with the work they should be doing.

If you've done much with the CF, then you're likely aware that NDOC doen't much like any namespace that's outside of the standard FFW (like the Microsoft.WindowsCE stuff).  While that's been an annoyance for documenting parts of the SDF (leaving holes in the docs), I just ran into a place where it prevents me from generationg any docs - when targeting the TinyCLR.

So, has anyone found anything that can generate decent looking docs without exploding on stuff it doesn't see (or maybe asking for the reference)?  I know NDOC is open source and I could get it working, but I'd rather do actual work.

Pop quiz, what does this code do?

DS1307 d = new DS1307(Cpu.Pin.GPIO20_VTU_TIO1A, Cpu.Pin.GPIO21_VTU_TIO2A);
d.SetRTC(new DateTime(2005, 2, 2, 21, 22, 0, 0));
for (int i = 0; i < 10; i++)
{
    DateTime dt = d.ReadRTC();
    Debug.Print(dt.Hour + ":" + dt.Minute + ":" + dt.Second);
    System.Threading.Thread.Sleep(2000);
}

So I finally ordered Halo II.  I put it off becasue I've had an unbelievably busy month and I knew that if I ordered it, productivity in getting the new house unpacked and all the other work I need to do would suffer, But I finally opened it up Friday night.  I finished the game last night - not bad considering I put in about 10 hours of coding on Sunday and didn't play at all.

Best part of the game?  Laura Prepon does the voiceover for a Marine and when she called one of the Covenant a jackass after shooting him I just about fell out of my chair.  I had no idea she had done a voice in the game, but it was unmistakably her.

Following Mike and Neil, I took the “What OS Am I” online quiz and found that I'm Slackware Linux.

Interesting.  I used to be a diehard Slackware user in '93-'94, in fact in my recent move I found the old distribution CDs.

Here's an article I found while browsing Casey's blog, and I must say it's quite simple as well as insightful.  Now as any good Linux advocate would do, Paul maligns Microsoft - I'm not here to say that's good or bad, my views have already been stated - but the overall observations are right on target.  I know several great developers, and every one of them fits this model.

Relative newcomers to the software industry, as well as a lot of people looking to get software done often ask some variant of the question “why does it cost so much to contract a developer?”  It might be disguised as “Why would I pay that much for a 3rd party component?” or “I can hire a junior programmer for a year for what they want for this!” but it always boils down to a misunderstanding of a value equation.

If a contractor quotes you $80 and hour you might be quick to say “that's about $160k a year!  Screw that!” but that misses a lot of things.  Leave out the fact that the contractor has to pay insurance, workers comp, FICA and all the overhead of a business.  Lets focus on what you're buying. 

You're not just buying an hour of that person's time.  You're buying the years of experience doing other work they have.  They're going to have seen far more problems and srewed up applications than a junior programmer will see in even their first 2 years.  You're buying access to a portfolio of base code they can draw from that is largely tested and true.  You're buying the late nights that they spent on past project pulling out their hair so that pitfalls are quickly avoided on your project.  Essentially you're paying for a much better ability to control the cost and schedule of your project.

So you're still thinking “it still seems expensive” are you?  Well face it, you can't sell an hour more than once.  If the contractor is selling you a product, you're getting a pro-rate on the hours spent developing the product because you're sharing the development hour with all of the other people buying the product.

Does it always make sense to contract out?  Of course not, but next time you're project has shot past a delivery deadline or gone overbudget and think about the experience base you have working on it then ask yourself “would having this project where the GANTT chart says I should be be worth the cost of a consultant?”

I'm installing Platform Builder 3.0 so I can do some legacy support and when it prompted for Disk 10 it occurred to me that those of us who bitch about how long it takes to install Studio 2003 need to do a sanity check.  Remember the days when Office was something like 30 1.44 floppies?

Thank goodness for Virtual PC - I'll only have to do this once.  If you're a developer and not familiar with VPC, go check it out.  I think it gives Studio competition as one of the top productivity tools for developers.  Hell, I have half a dozen PCs without having to buy all the hardware, and it's easy to load to a known configuration.

Well I shut down commenting a while ago due to blog spammers.  I'm turning them back on and we'll see if it remains a problem.

This is worth a watch.

Neil covered some great mechanisms for getting 10,000 records into a device database:

<quote>
1. Tie one end of a piece of string to the WiFi antenna, if your device has
one, and tie the other end to a tin can. Enumerate the 10,000 records on
your desktop computer and verablly dictate each record into the tin can.

Performance: slow;
Success rate: zero.
Implementation: easy peasy lemon squeezy.

2. Purchase a flock of carrier pigeons, 10,000 in number. Hand-write each
record onto a piece of paper and attach to the bird. Aim the bird at the
device and release.

Performance: slow:
Success rate: zero.
Implementation: possibly very messy.

3. Move to SQL Server. RDA and Merge Replication are your friends.

Performance: good!
Success rate: >1,000,000,000 pigeons.
Implementation: well documented.

4. Hire 10,000 people and get them to memorize one record each. Get them to
follow the device wherever it goes.

Performance: In theory, should outperform Oracle for record access. In
reality, you're statistically likely to get a few "slow" records
Success rate: Depends on the demographics of your recordset.
Implementation: costly, just like Oracle :)

5. Populate the DataSet on the server and transmit as a DataSet object using
Web Services ().

Performance: suffers from a serialization/deserialization overhead which is
costly with 10,000 records.
Success rate: Jackpot, baby!
Implementation: piece of cake.

6. Re-architect your solution. No one should need 10,000 records on a
device. Don't even think about loading that into a ListView either :)

Performance: the best yet.
Success rate: it's the pot of gold at the end of the rainbow.
Implementation: requires some research and reading of those folded paper
thingies.... (books)
</quote>

They've finally done it!

So now NASA is considering using robots to repairHubble instead of a manned mission.  The primary reasoning being that it is safer and more cost effective.  While laudible reasons, I think that using robots should be the preferred method for a completely different reason.

Let's face it, putting a man up there and doing repairs, maintenance and upgrades isn't technically challenging (though it is rocket science).  We've done it all before, and doing it again really doesn't teach us anything or push the boundaries of space exploration for us.  Using a robot, on the other hand, is a new advancement.  We've not done it before and by pursuing it we'll be improving our ability to understand the complexities of the job.  THis will further our ability to make robots that repair other craft and machines even further from Earth.

So by all means, scrap an astronaut visit. It's costly, risky, and just plain boring.  If we want to push further in our abilities to explore space, we need to push our abilities to do work locally, and in this seemingly rare case what is good for science may also be good politically.

After reading Neil Cowburn's resolutions, I feel compelled to lay out my own:

1. I will learn better how hardware and data buses work by learning PIC programming
2. I will finish my Pocket Excel wrapper
3. I will resist the temptation to always start new projects when I have unfinished ones on my plate
4. I will overcome my loathing for web programming and try out ASP.NET
5. I will get off my lazy ass and learn how the DataSet class works

Of course I should add to that the fact that I need to place more effort into some project that provide me financial benefit, otherwise my wife is going to get a bit fed-up with me burning so much personal time.  Anyone need any small project help or side work done?  :)