Tuesday, September 09, 2008 #

How to make your staff more productive + 6 days

As it turns out, my client has a piece of software running on a server called "Freeloader" ... it's written in VB, has very bad resolution for some reason, but they're quite proud of it... picture of the guy responsible and listing of all the folks that helped in the About box.

Freeloader is a list of all sorts of free software that's been vetted by the IT department for use inside the company. You select what you want, and it downloads the software to your system so you can install it. It will optionally "send you a license via email" ... I tried that on a few and never got the email, so I guess that part is broken.

The other thing is... they've taken all the packages and re-zipped them with password protection. And probably 60% of the software is IT-related stuff.

Fortunately there are a couple good things on there such as PrimoPDF and FireFox.

I worked my way up the IT chain-of-command to try to get "Toad Free" accepted and there were a couple deal-breakers:

  1. Quest's license of only 5 devs at a company running it... how do you control that? 
  2. The re-download every 60 days. They didn't say it, but I looked and it takes a 6-page document to get the approval process started, and it probably takes more than 60 days to approve something, so you'd NEVER get caught up.

I was told that it would be easier to buy the software than to go through the process... go figure!

So yesterday I finally sent email requesting that they purchase me a license for the product used other places in the building. I figured since it's used in the building already, it would be easier to get it approved. So today I get a phone call wanting to go back through all the information again... what it is, how it's used, why I need it. I ask what's going on, and they tell me that the paperwork got bounced because I'm a contractor and my company should be buying this... great... like that would happen even if it would work!

I asked them how that would fit in with the IT regulations of the software having to be owned by the company. Hmmm.

Actually I'm about at the point that I don't care... I just won't be able to make add/change a table, index, stored procedure, view, function, trigger, or sequence... that's all.

We're talking $180 for a key... I'd buy the damn thing myself, but oh... I can't run personal software either, so I guess they're going to have to figure this one out.

NOW I remember one of the reasons I've always worked for small companies!

Anybody looking for a somewhat old, beaten-down .NET developer with a penchant for Silverlight?

-Dave
Posted On Tuesday, September 09, 2008 2:31 PM | Feedback (4)

Silverlight Cream for September 09, 2008 -- #364

Alex Golesh altering style dynamically, Tim Heuer revisits the Install, Mike Taulty on Async Events and Binding Images to URIs, Expression Blend blog on Deep Zoom Resources, Adam Kinney on Project Rosetta, and Terence Tsang on Simple Drawing

If you are in NYC on 9/13, Tim Heuer has announced Silverlight in the Big Apple.

Koen Zwikstra has announed A Minor SilverlightSpy Bugfix.

Chris Carper, on his Business of Silverlight blog has a post about Sunday Night Football on NBC.

Anna Wrochna has posted her Most Useful Silverilght Techniques taken from SilverlightCream.

Archived at: SilverlightCream.com:
Quick Silverlight Tip: Define control style dynamically
Alex Golesh discusses making style changes at run-time and use external style definitions... good information if you're not familiar with it!
Silverlight install experience too hard?
With all the banter back and forth on the web, Tim Heuer takes yet another whack at the "Silverlight is too hard to install" issues... better you than me, my friend :)
Silverlight, Async, Events
Mike Taulty has a long post about Silverlight and Asynchronous events. Links out to other resources, and lots of code...
Silverlight 2 - Binding Images to Uri's
Mike also has this post about binding Images to URIs... seems I've seen this one discussed a bunch lately as well!
Deep Zoom Resources
The Expression Blend and Design Blog folks posted a good up-to-date list of resources for DeepZoom, and I thought it would be something worth capturing!
Project Rosetta, From Flash to Silverlight
I hadn't blogged about Project Rosetta because I'm not a flash guy, and I figured it wouldn't take long for one of the big guys to post a good intro about it, and my friend Adam Kinney stepped up to that plate... great post ...
Flash vs Silverlight: Simple Drawing
Last but not least is Terence Tsang... I blogged his first entry a while back and for some reason did not add his blog to my big list-o-blogs, and when I got a look at it yesterday, holy moly... when does he sleep??? I'm not going to try to catch up with him right now, and I may not, but at least I've got his latest listed here... and he's doing some seriously cool stuff!

Stay in the 'Light!
Twitter SLNews | Join me @ SilverlightCream | SL Web Articles | SL2 Web Articles | My Articles | My Tutorials | My Tooltips | My SL2 Articles | My SL2 ToolTips | SilverlightCream
Posted On Tuesday, September 09, 2008 11:02 AM | Feedback (7)

Don't give up on Live Mesh!

If you read my blog much, you'll know I can't run Live Mesh at the office, so what's the point, eh?

Well, to get ready for my presentations at Dev Teach Montreal, I got myself a new(er) laptop... one with bigger cajones, and I can run Live Mesh on it. It may seem silly since when it's on the network I can just attach a folder from the other machine, but then I'm always having to be sure to remember where I changed files last, so why not let Live Mesh deal with it?

So I got it all wired up, and things seemed to be working pretty good and then all of a sudden, I'm getting messages about duplicate files and I'm being asked to decide between them, and yuck... so I figured I screwed something up -- not an uncommon happening around my house :)

So I just nuked the folder in Live Mesh and started anew from the main machine, but wait... I got it again the next day. In the words of my buddy Tim Heuer, "Sonofa...".

So now what?

Today in doing my Silverlight MiningTM I came across this post by the Live Mesh Team: Got conflicts or missing files? Read this (and don't uninstall for now)

So... it's not me :) ... oh, and also it's not YOU... feel better now?... I'm glad to have read that, because I like the idea of using it, particularly when I will be away from the house and of course someplace other than here.

Stay in the 'Light!
Posted On Tuesday, September 09, 2008 9:46 AM | Feedback (0)
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