Chris Pietschmann

Today is the last day to enter the 2010 Community Coding Contest for a chance to win an MSDN Ultimate Subscription plus a total of approximately $20,719 worth of prizes!!

All you need to do is write some source code to do something, and enter it into the contest. Who know, you could be one of the winners!

http://communitycodingcontest.org

General contest, community

Update Monday, Aug. 16, 2010: My startup, Carto LLC, is now enrolled in the BizSpark program! Also, if you are having similar issues getting enrolled in BizSpark (are legitimate company and not trying to scam the system) then feel free to contact me through this blog. I now know who to contact directly on the BizSpark team, and may be able to help you out.

Update Sunday, Aug. 15, 2010: I just got off the phone with Cliff Reeves, the General Manager responsible for BizSpark. Apparently, BizSpark has recently dealt with some problems of piracy with people enrolling in BizSpark who do not have a legitimate company. He assured me that the any confusion causing my denial of enrollement into BizSpark will be fixed, and I am going to get an invitation code to get Carto LLC enrolled on Monday. This was a really prompt response, and I really appreciate him taking time out of his weekend to get in touch. Also, he mentioned that they are going to work at either calling people or telling them why they do not meet the eligibility requirements, instead of just sending a generic message on the order of "You do not meet the requirements at this time."

Original Post:

I know the title of this post is a little on the strong side, but I am currently really perterbed about the Microsoft BizSpark program. Some of you may know that I have been involved in founding a new startup, Carto LLC. Carto is a software as a service business that specializes in developing and hosting custom GIS-based (Map-based) line of business applications that perfectly fit the needs of the client. Since we are just starting out, I thought I would get Carto enrolled in the Microsoft BizSpark program, but have been denied twice! Also, they have no contact phone number and my email was ignored!

What is BizSpark?

Basically BizSpark was started as an on-going effort by Microsoft to get more startups to use Microsoft technologies and products instead of going with open source. The way that they do it is by making the technology and software extremely cheap for startups that qualify for the BizSpark program.

According to Microsoft, BizSpark is...

"Launched in November 2008, the BizSpark program is designed to help accelerate the success of entrepreneurs and early-stage startups globally. The program provides fast and easy access to current, full-featured software development tools and platforms, and a connection to over 2,000 BizSpark Network Partners – including university incubators, hosters, government agencies, investors, consultants and financial institutions – all with a common goal of supporting entrepreneurship. BizSpark startups can also have the opportunity to achieve global visibility to an audience of potential investors, clients, and partners by profiling their company and posting offers and events in the BizSpark online networking hub, BizSpark Connect. Join a community of over 30,000 startups enrolled in BizSpark by signing up today."

Enrollment in BizSpark is free, as long as the startup meets the following requirements:

1. Actively engaged in development of a software-based product or online service that will form a core piece of its current or intended business.
2. Privately held.
3. In business for less than 3 years
4. Less than $1 million in annual revenue

Then if you meet those requirements you get free Microsoft software to use for that three year period, at the end of which you are required to pay a fee of $100 USD.

Apparently Microsoft Does Not Really Care About Startups!

About 4 weeks ago, I applied to BizSpark for my new startup, Carto LLC. After about a week I got an email saying that we were denied because "it does not appear that you meet all the eligibility requirements at this time." After being denied I looked on the BizSpark website to see if I could find a contact phone number, so I could call to find out why we were denied. They have no contact number published. However, in the denial email I recieved, they state that you can email, bizspark@microsoft.com, if you have any questions.

About 3 weeks ago, I emailed bizspark@microsoft.com to find out why we were denied entry into BizSpark. I also explained in the email that we definately meet the four posted requirements on their website. I never recieved a reply.

About 1 week ago, I tried applying for the BizSpark program a second time. After about a week, I recieved another email stating that we were denied due to not meeting the requirements.

Today, I emailed bizspark@microsoft.com again, am posting this message to my blog, and spreading it on my Twitter and LinkedIn  account.

I am really annoyed that Microsoft would offer such poor support for this program that they have been promoting so much. I am a Microsoft MVP (have been since 2008) and promote Microsoft products to people everyday. I have also been recommending the BizSpark program to others interested in starting their own companies. This send me the message that Microsoft does not really care about startups all that much, even though they say they do. Unless this gets resolved, I will tell people specifically not to bother with BizSpark, since Microsoft obviously does not care about startups all that much.

How many others have been denied entry in to BizSpark for no apparent reason? If it happened to me, I assume there are others that it has happened to.

I would really like someone from the BizSpark team to contact me. I can be reached on this blog, @crpietschmann, or on LinkedIn.

General bizspark

"Congratulations! We are pleased to present you with the 2010 Microsoft® MVP Award!"

I'm happy to announce that I've been awarded the Microsoft MVP award for the third year in a row. Just like last year, I've been awarded within the "Windows Live Platform" category. The "Windows Live Platform" category includes the Bing Maps SDK (both JavaScript and Silverlight Map Controls) which is the product/technology that I work with and help out others with the most in this category.

Congratulations to all other April MVP's, both new and renewed!

If you're not familiar with what the Microsoft MVP Program is you can find more information about it here: http://mvp.support.microsoft.com/gp/mvpawardintro

Bing Maps, General awards

I've read a couple of "Intro" to neuroscience and psychology books, and what I've learned has fascinated and inspired my way more than anything I've learned about computers and electronics over the years. The Brain is truly the more complex "computer" the work has ever seen!

Here's a couple books I've read that I highly recommend:

A User's Guide to the Brain: Attention, Preception, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John Ratey

Thinking in Pictures: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin

A couple other books I highly recommend that are related to this area; even if they are more Sociological:

Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems by Cesar Millan

Be The Pack Leader: Use Cesar's Way to Transform Your Dog ... And Your Life by Cesar Millan

I've decided to start in the pursuit of a degree in Neuroscience; instead of Computer Science even though CS may be "easier" since I've been doing software programming/development/architecture for ~8+ years now. There are TONS of things that an academic path in Neuroscience can lead to. So, I really don't know exactly where I'll end up, but I do know that i want to learn more about the Brain, how it works and what awesome things can be done. Just think about what could be done with interfacing the brain and robotics, and how that could help someone with an amputation or paralysis. Or just working with artificial intelligence to create a computer that a person could truly interact with naturally. Or helping research and cure debilitating neurological deseases/disorders.

In addition to working, I'm currently enrolled in a few classes at the University of Wisconsin this semester. Technically, I'm a full-time student, but I still have work to do, a wife, a baby girl to raise, and plenty of software development technology to learn and write about. So, if I EVER thought I was busy, man was I wrong. I'm the busiest now than I've ever been, but man is it all enlightening!

Consequentially, as a result of studying Chemistry, Biology, Psychology and perhaps a little Sociology in the pursuit of Neuroscience, I may be blogging about those topics at times too in addition to software development. Just to warn you, this blog may transform to a whole different level of interesting; that is if I have the time to write.

I just wanted to let everyone know that I'm not disappearing from blogging or the web as you've seen (I know I have) other developers do when they go through certain life changes.

College, General neuroscience, psychology, sociology, college

My Brother In Law, Jeremy, is back now after his second tour in Iraq. This time he was gone only 12 months, instead of 18 months the first time. He has a wife (my sister) and 3 boys (3yrs, 6yrs and 9yrs) of whom were eagerly awaiting his return. The people at WXOW Channel 19 in La Crosse, WI interviewed them when he returned to Wisconsin.

Written Article - "Family waits for soldiers return"

Video of Interview - "Family waits for soldiers return"

The above picture is from the video, and is most likely owned / copyright WXOW Channel 19. FYI, This picture is not under the Creative Commons Attribution License that covers all other content on this blog.

General

I really haven't been reading enough books of the the last few years. Sure I read a ton of blogs and such online, but what about books? Books are nice, cohesive collections of information; at least most of the time. There are a lot of things I'd like to learn more about, both related to computers and not. So, sometime in January (this wasn't a new years resolution, just a coincidence), I decided to try to read at minimum 12 books throughout the year. Basically, at least 1 book each month, and after seemingly falling behind a few times, to my surprise, it seems that I am on track.

Here's the list of books that I've read so far this year in order of first to most recent:

1. The Art of Deception: Controlling the Human Element of Security by Kevin D. Mitnick
2. Beginning Spatial with SQL Server 2008 by Alistair Aitchison
3. A User's Guid to the Brain: Perception, Attention, and the Four Theaters of the Brain by John J. Ratey
4. Cesar's Way: The Natural, Everyday Guide to Understanding and Correcting Common Dog Problems by Cesar Millan
5. Pro WPF in C# 2008 by Matthew MacDonald
6. Professional ASP.NET MVC 1.0 by "The 4 Extended Foreheads" (Rob Conery, Scott Hanselman, Phil Haack, Scott Guthrie)
7. Thinking in Pictures, Expanded Edition: My Life with Autism by Temple Grandin
8. A Brief History of Time: The Updated And Expanded Tenth Anniversary Edition by Stephen Hawking
9. jQuery in Action by Bear Bibeault, Yehuda Katz
10. Code: The Hidden Language of Computer Hardware and Software by Charles Petzold

Keep in mind that it took me anywhere from 1 to 3 months to find the time to read some of these books.

The book I am currently reading is...

Be the Pack Leader: Use Cesar's Way to Transform Your Dog ... And Your Life by Cesar Millan

Wow, and to my surprise I'm currently on book number 11 for the year. Maybe I'll be able to read a total of 12 or 13 books before the years end. I guess only time will tell.

Happy Reading!

General books, personal

Some of you that follow my blog may have noticed that it’s been almost a month since I’ve really posted anything. I know I’ve done this in the past when I’ve been busy working on other things (mostly to get paid), but this time it’s for an entirely different reason…

My wife and I had a beautiful baby girl! And, we’ve been adjusting to our new sleep schedule of only getting 2-4 hours of sleep maximum at a time. Anyone with kids understands how it is with a newborn, and now only after having one do I fully understand. After all, I was sleeping way too much before anyway.

Things have been going absolutely wonderful!

I’m still trying to figure out how I’m going to have enough time to keep on blogging and learning now that I have most of my time dedicated elsewhere. One thing I don’t want to do is completely disappear from the web, like I’ve seen other tech bloggers do after a major personal life change such as this. So, I’ll just keep on blogging here and there, and maybe I’ll still be able to improve the quality of my posts.

Thanks!

General general

I first started downloading Windows 7 Ultimate off MSDN using the old File Transfer Manager and it was taking FOREVER to download. The download started out good, then it dropped off to about 40KB/sec and said it would take about 14 hours to finish! Man, I was hoping I’d be able to get it downloaded quick so I can start updating my machines today/tonight.

Then I saw a Twitter post by @Rickster_CDN mentioning a link to a page with the AKAMAI links for TechNet to download Windows 7 WAY FASTER! Actually the link is to the “Top Downloads” page on TechNet.

It turns out that MSDN has the same kind of “Top Downloads” page, so  you can really use AKAMAI to download Windows 7 much FASTER whether you have an MSDN or TechNet Subscription.

Here’s the Links:

TechNet Top Downloads with AKAMAI Links

MSDN Top Downloads with AKAMAI Links

I’m currently downloading Windows 7 Ultimate RTM at about 1.3MB/sec and I have about 28 minutes left. It sure beat the crap out of the File Transfer Manager downloading at about 40KB/sec.

Happy Downloading!

General windows, msdn, technet, akamai, download

Microsoft has announced the initial pricing for Windows Azure, SQL Azure and .NET Services. My question is still "What is the Minimum it will cost to host a small website/application on Azure?"

If your application is racking up "Compute" time when ever it is "live", then that equals a total of approximately 720 hours of "compute" time for a total of $86.40 per month.

If you store less than 1GB of files, that's $0.15 per month.

Then if you also use a database with SQL Azure, that's an additional $9.99 per month for up to a 1GB relational database.

Now if the website uses 10GB of bandwidth (that's how much my blog used last month), then that's about $1.50 per month.

If you add all these up, that's a Total of $98.04! And that looks like the very minimum cost of hosting an average "small" app/website on Azure. That surely doesn't make me want to switch my DiscountASP.NET and GoDaddy.com hosting accounts over to Windows Azure.

I can't believe Microsoft isn't making it cheaper to host a small website on Azure, by making the "Compute" time so expensive. Unless of course I'm misunderstanding how "Compute" time is calculated. Does anyone know if I am correct in assuming that 1 full day of hosting your application will rack up 24 hours of total "Compute" time? I hope I'm wrong on this.

Below is a summary of the pricing:

Windows Azure:

    * Compute @ $0.12 / hour
    * Storage @ $0.15 / GB stored
    * Storage Transactions @ $0.01 / 10K

SQL Azure:

    * Web Edition – Up to 1 GB relational database @ $9.99
    * Business Edition – Up to 10 GB relational database @ $99.99

Bandwidth across all three services will be charged at $0.10 in / $0.15 out / GB

More Info on Azure Pricing

General, Azure azure

I’ve been questioning here and there as to what happened to Managed JScript on the Dynamic Language Runtime. The most recent preview release is really old, and it has since been taken out of any further preview releases of the DLR, where as IronRuby and IronPython continue on.

No More Managed JScript on the DLR?

For some time I never really got any good answers. Well, it’s really sad to hear that apparently Microsoft decided to drop it completely.

According the this link, a member on the DLR team has this to say:

“The DLR JScript was experimental for informing the design of the DLR (expression trees, interop, callsites, hosting, etc.). The JS we released with asp futures and the Silverlight dynamic sdk became very old and unserviceable as the DLR continued evolving for release in CLR 4.0. unfortunately, there are no plans at this time to develop and release a DLR hostable JScript.”

“Experimental for informing the design”??

I understand what this means, but since Managed JScript was used to help build the DLR from the beginning then “Why didn’t they keep it up to date?”

Plus if you go read the Initial Announcement of Managed JScript over on the JScript Blog you will see the following statement:

“We are working to make sure that Managed JScript is a first class language on top of DLR.”

What part of that post and the above statement specify that it’s only “experimental” and not to actually ever get released?

I’m really curious to find out who actually made the decision to drop it, and what the real reason is. Was it you ScottGu?

Why not Open Source it?

Well, the next logical question to ask is “Why not release what was done for Managed JScript as Open Source under a Public License?” At least this way it would allow the community to take it and run with it.

Are there Alternative Implementations?

None that I could find for .NET and/or the DLR. If you know of any, please let me know!

I did however find the Rhino project from Mozilla, but it’s for Java. According to Mozilla, “Rhino is an open-source implementation of JavaScript written entirely in Java. It is typically embedded into Java applications to provide scripting to end users.”  I guess this could be a start at building one for .NET/DLR, but…

Update: I did find the MyJScript project on CodePlex; it’s not a complete implemenation, but it does show the basics on how to create your own scripting language on the DLR. There is also an companion article to the MyJScript project: http://www.dotnetguru.org/us/dlrus/DLR2.htm

Further Info

Here’s a few links that have some small bits of info in addition to that linked above:

http://dlr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=58121

http://dlr.codeplex.com/Thread/View.aspx?ThreadId=41990

http://channel9.msdn.com/posts/Charles/Jimmy-Schementi-Inside-IronRuby/?CommentID=472955

http://channel9.msdn.com/shows/Going+Deep/John-Lam-and-Martin-Maly-Deep-DLR/?CommentID=472957

http://blogs.msdn.com/jscript/archive/2007/05/04/managed-jscript-announced.aspx

Conclusion

I’ve very disappointed to hear this sad news. However, I guess I could always work on building my own Managed JScript compiler/library for the DLR; if I could only find the time in between my other open source work and other paying gigs.

Until then, I guess I can only hope that Microsoft (or would it be ScottGu) decides to reconsider.

JavaScript, General javascript, dlr, .net framework