Must try this out: Candied Bacon Ice Cream Recipe!

How could that not be good?  Bacon.  Not just bacon: but candied bacon!  And Ice cream!

So much for low carb.

I watched this video from Revenue Boot Camp which was held in July:

Everything I do is focused on ‘the enterprise’ but this stuff plays there as well.  Lots to think about.

Several weeks ago I was talking with a friend who is also a developer.  I was talking about some of my various experiments with entrepreneurship and his responses were really funny.

I was talking about CodeSmith and a tool I had in mind to go along with it.  His response was that developers wouldnt buy it.  Developers do not buy that kind of stuff was his assertion.

Oh really?  CodeSmith?  ReSharper?  Code Rush? Telerik? so on and so on.  All businesses that sell add ons for VisualStudio.  All doing reasonably well from what little I can tell.  Frankly I can’t use Visual Studio without Resharper anymore.  I have so many templates and snippets setup using it that using VS in the buff is like pour salt in my eyes.

Responses like the above are part of the reason I don’t talk to developer’s too much about what I’m doing.  Actually, I’m nearing the point where I don’t bother asking for advice from anybody.  To date the amount of usable advice I have received is next to nothing.  It is really discouraging.  What you really end up getting when you talk to people is a reflection of how the world works. 

What brought this topic to mind for me is this post by Seth Godin: “The Rule of High School”.  His point is to not take things too seriously.  Stay focused on what you are doing.  You’ll hear a lot of crap from irrelevant people that think you ought to be doing things in some particular fashion.  Great: tell them to go do it that way and see how it works.

So if you can’t listen to your friends and colleagues, who do you listen to?  Basically, the market.  In my case what I’m building is going to be web focused.  So I’ll pay attention to three things: customers, traffic, and communities.

Customers come first because they’ve actually opened their wallet and handed over money.  That indicates a certain level of commitment.  Even if it is not money, just registration for example, these people deserve your attention.  Find out what they want, what their problems are and what they say they need.  Address those things.

Traffic is next.  If you do not have traffic (ahem) then you are doing something wrong.  Figure it out and fix it.  If you do have traffic but the conversion sucks you are doing something wrong.  Figure it out and fix it.  Watching traffic provides feedback about how well your marketing is working.  That deserves attention.

Communities are last.  Communities in your niche are basically your future customers.  the same questions apply to them: what do they want, what are their problems, and what do they need.  Learn to gather that information efficiently and then learn to analyze it and use the analysis to help address the other two areas.

Basically the three areas can be summaries up to paying attention to feedback from a large group of people.  Just like in high school, if you just take the feedback from bullies you’ll end up sitting in a dark corner hugging your knees rocking back and fourth hoping the bad people will just go away.  But if you take a wider sampling you’ll see a very different world.

Sure there are developers that refuse to buy anything.  Irrelevant.  There are plenty of developers that are smart enough to see the value in finding tools and utilities that will help increase their productivity.  But if you listen to the first group you’ll never venture out and find the other group.

I need to get the number of months between two dates.  Unfortunately the timespan object does not provide that.  It is easy enough to calculate, but even better: use VB!  Add a reference to Microsoft.VisualBasic in your project and then in your code add:

DateAndTime.DateDiff(DateInterval.Month, startDate, endDate

                     ,FirstDayOfWeek.Sunday, FirstWeekOfYear.Jan1);

The problem you’ll run in to is the last two parameters.  In VB they are not required, but you have no way to not send them in C#.  In my case the parameters I chose will work well enough.  YMMV.

It has been raining nonstop for the past….well forever.  Soccer got cancelled so I didn’t get to watch my daughter play.  Then I went to the track.  MSR was open and the 1.3 mile track (my favorite) was open for members.  Too bad it was marginal at best.  One bad wet spot on the entrance to one of my favorite turns.  Could live with it by changing my line a little.  The killer though was a nice ankle deep pond on the exit to the final turn going on to the front straight.  Basically it was so bad that you would essentially have to brake and then coast through way up high to avoid the water, but still be in the wet.

So basically there was no way to put together a good lap for anybody at any skill level.  With those factors it wasn’t worth spending the money, even if I need to work on my skills.

Then the weather continues Sunday and more of it today.  Seriously.  I thought I lived in Texas.  Isn’t it supposed to be dry here?  We’ve gotten more rain than Seattle.  At this rate my house is going to get washed out to the gulf.

All this weather really has me feeling like doing a whole lot of nothing.  This weekend looks like it should clear up.  Maybe I’ll get a track day in on Sunday.  And maybe my daughter will get to play soccer.

When working with the CRM service by way of the SDK be sure to mark your retrieve requests with ReturnDynamicEntities.  If you do not and your are retrieving a custom entity you’ll get an InvalidOperationException that doesnt basically says “yeah, that query you just did, it didn’t” when it should really provide something like “uh, try that again but try setting RetrunDynamicEntities to true this time.  OK?”.  It’s clear enough if you want to chase the call stack down to where XmlSerializer pukes, but my more descriptive exception would save you some time.

Anyway, hope that helps.

I have been writing a lot of reports lately, all of them for CRM.  IT has been a cool experience because I’ve been looking for an opportunity to get really intimate with SSRS for a while. 

The result has been great.  I think SSRS is a freakishly great product with really bad documentation.  However, as you get things figured out you begin to wonder how you have lived without.

But the point of the story today is the experience I have had trying to integrate the reports in to CRM.  Being rather naive I thought I could just use Visual Studio to create an RDL file and then import it in to CRM.  Not so.  When you try this approach you’ll get a really vague error message.  Googling around won’t help much either.  The specific search term I kept using was “CRM reports existing file "an error occurred””.

The issue it turns out is a disgreement between CRM and VS about data sources.  Visual Studio’s idea is that the data source should be kept separate.  This is good because it makes deployment easy – each environment has the same data source with a different (and appropriate) connection string.  CRM however wants the data source (the connection string) stored in the RDL directly.  I’ve not fully explored this, but it concerns me.

Anyway, if you go off and create a report using the Visual Studio report designer (or any other RDL editor); before you import the file open it (in VS you can right click the file and choose View Code) and look at the DataSource element.  If you see ConnectionProperties, ConnectionString, and DataProvider you are good to go.  Otherwise you need to create them. 

To get the settings to use you can just export an existing CRM report and look at it.

Hopefully, this will save you a few hours of banging your head.

I took an improv class a few years ago from Four Day Weekend.  The class was great and I learned a lot about how to communicate with a crowd of people.  Then in my google reader I get a link to Business of Software’s Pecha Kucha thing.  I think the presentation is meant to be funny, but I’m not quite sure.

The reason I’m not certain goes back to the improv stuff.  The book they used is “Truth in Comedy”.  The point is that what makes things funny is the truth behind it.  The BoS presenter is joking about raising money for a web2.0 startup, doing some crap and then making a pile of money.  It’s presented jokingly and the audience obediently laughs (I did too), but part of my mind can’t help but go ‘hmmmm, how far off the truth is this guy?’.

I’ve heard it repeated until blood has shot out of my ears that 90% of businesses fail.  I’ve also heard plenty of stories of people that raised a pile of cash, hired a bus load of overseas developers and delivered absolutely nothing.  They then went on to repeat the process again. and again.  I even know some people like that.  What did they do while the coders worked 12 hour days?  I really don’t know.  Probably played golf or some other lame game like it.

So while the presentation makes a caricature of the process, I’m not sure how far from the truth he is.  Investors know going in to a deal that there is a lot of risk in a startup.  They do it because the potential upside is (still is) huge.  Consider this: “Think Social Media Is A Fad? Think Again..” here is video that makes the point better:

I recently took a class on Internet Marketing (IM not to be confused with instant messaging though).  One of the points they made is that the world’s population is around 6 billion.  America alone is 350 million.  A successful consumer oriented company that focuses on a niche that represents 1% of the overall American population has a market size of roughly 3.5 Million people!  If your advertising/sales is able to reach that entire niche and cause 1% of those people to become first time buyers you would sell 350,000 units to that group.  A product that sales for $24.95 sold to that group would create $8.7 million in revenue.  Keep in mind, you don’t just run 1 advertising campaign at a time, and you don’t run the campaign only 1 time.  Further, you sell more than one product.  So overtime you reach more people in that market that have never bought from you.  The theory goes that once you’ve made the first time sale to a customer that the barrier for the follow on sales is lower.  You’ve established trust and the customer knows what to expect (think McDonalds, only better).

Just this little niche could potentially create a business with revenue of 32 million a year* with a staff of maybe 10 people.  The cost of running the business might be 5 million a year.  Keep things simple and most of the money is profit.  What investor wouldn’t hand over $250K to own a piece of that?  If it succeeds the $250K investment will be made back in the first dividend check and then some.

So, yeah the presentation is funny.  But it is funny not because it is totally made up; it is funny because it is true.  But it is even funnier because we are laughing thinking he is making it up to be funny.

*I came up with 32 million because the IMers I know typically run ads for 90 days so in this scenario they would run 1 campaign each quarter resulting in sales of 350K each quarter.