Certain things happened today that quickly reminded me of my IR35 rant the other day. Politicians sometimes deserve our criticisms and that forms a vital part of any democracy, however, making personal remarks (as I did) about anyone is not right in any situation. I have therefore revised that post, added this one as a reminder to myself and apologise to anyone who was offended.
I recently experienced a problem on 2 of my SharePoint virtual machines where the event log was filling up with an error along the lines of;
Event ID: 6482 – Reason: Access to the path ‘C:\WINDOWS\system32\drivers\etc\HOSTS’ is denied.
I searched for help with little success and ended up restoring one the VMs to a baseline position however, within a day it was reporting the same errors again. This time when I searched for help I came across this post by Christian Vesterkvist and this seems to have solved the problems. I haven’t had a chance to do any meaningful diagnostics but my initial hunch is that it is related to installing SP1.
If you haven’t heard the SharePoint Pod Show yet then I highly recommend you try it out. One of the hosts, Nick Swan is a good friend and occasional golf buddy and I’ve also had the pleasure of meeting co-host Brett Lonsdale a few times. Together with US based Rob Foster they are doing a great job of bringing SharePoint current affairs to us by interviewing a wide range of really interesting people in the field.
In episode 16 Brett interviewed the amazing Todd Bleeker and believe me, I use the word amazing quite advisedly. A couple of years back I was fortunate enough to attend a Combined Knowledge 5 day WSS 3.0 Developer course delivered by Todd and not only does he have a rack of Quad core, HP Proliant blades running 128Gb RAM for a brain but he is also a genuinely nice and really interesting guy with an obvious passion for SharePoint and development (listen to the interview and you will know exactly what I mean).
In the interview Todd talks about the SPDisposeCheck tool, where it’s at, what’s missing and how to use it. I was especially interested by what he had to say on integration with Visual Studio and I noticed that Eli Van Eenwyk blogged a post on the subject here.
I often read people gushing about the SharePoint community for just this sort of thing; people like the SharePoint Pod Show guys, Todd, Eli and an absolute host of others continually give up their own time for nothing more than the buzz of helping others (special mention to guys like Andrew Woodward, Andrew Connell, Chris O’Brien, Joel Oleson and Scott Guthrie to name but a few who have been of particular help to me over the years). However, I have noticed an overall increase in community activity throughout the areas I am interested such as Silverlight and SQL Server too and this is further evidenced in the UK through events like DeveloperDeveloperDeveloper! Day and the Next Generation User Group meetings.
Since going out on my own as an independent in the UK, the single biggest concern has always been the IR35 law. This is our government’s attempt to make people like myself pay tax on our income in exactly the same way as a permanent employee would. I’m not going to stand on my soapbox (well maybe just a little) and I don’t have the inclination to debate the moral or legal arguments around IR35. It is clear that nobody, legally trained or otherwise, is able to definitively determine when an independent is (or is not) operating outside of IR35. However, I noticed this article recently published on the Contractor UK website that certainly helped to reassure me.
Personally, I have never been interested in the ‘security’ of a longer term contract as one of the many reasons I left permanent employment was to get away from the monotony of spending Monday to Friday, 9 to 5 doing the same work with the same people staring at the same 4 walls. I have therefore tended to gravitate to work and contracts that are project based but, especially when applying for work through agencies, it is not until you are actually doing the work that you get the full picture of what is required of you.
*** What follows is pure opinion and a self gratifying rant ***
The bottom line for me is that I am more than happy to contribute a fair rate of tax and pay my way, even though the UK government seems preoccupied with using it to drop bombs and bail out greedy bankers. Tony Blair, Gordon Brown and Alistair Darling have proven to be three of the most ineffective individuals this country could have had guiding it into and through a global recession and have left us far worse off than we need to have been. That just irritates me all the more when I work in excess of 5 days a week and feel like I’m seen as a wanton tax dodger.
As a SharePoint developer and consultant, when I am asked if something can be done with SharePoint or how to solve a business problem my thoughts often start with (or quickly arrive at) SharePoint Features created in Visual Studio projects and deployed as SharePoint Solutions. In truth I shouldn’t need reminding, I see evidence all the time that there are often very simple solutions to solve business requirements and the use of Visual Studio can often be seen as a sledgehammer to crack a nut.
Case in point, UK based SharePoint MVP Alex Pearce has posted a really nice little tutorial; Add a Banner to your SharePoint Site. It’s a perfect example of the power in the WSS/MOSS platform; a solution that can be quickly and easily created and up and running on a pilot site but has the potential to be deployed as a SharePoint Feature, and therefore a Solution, if so required.
I’ll tell you what next – they’ll have us working on Macs and wearing flowery shirts, that’s what next!
Deep breaths… and relax.
So what got me so up tight? I was browsing the Silverlight community area and happened upon this blog post from Arturo Toledo, a Microsoft Product Manager on the UX Platform & Tools team. They have produced a series of short videos called UI Design for Developers in cooperation with Total Training and having watched the first 5 (from 13) I have to say they have done a pretty fantastic job. Here is what Arturo has to say:
“…we produced these 13 video series with quick tips & tricks for non designers to learn more about design. This is something I officially consider Part I because teaching design takes longer than just 13 videos but I hope these help you to get a little deeper into design.”
Not only do the videos take you step-by-step through some of the fundamental principals, but they are a great tool for getting some familiarity with Expression too.
Maybe, just maybe, us developers and those designers don’t have to be divided by Macs and PCs, combats and flowery shirts anymore?
