I work from home. The beauty of it is... you have full control over your time. The bad part is... you have full control over your time. So, embrace the guilt. First, you have to figure out if its about the money or about the eating habbits. Mine is the later. If you're an average developer or if you're older than 30 then you're likely over weight. So, do yourself a favor and rotate your life around excercise... not around food. The best thing I did for myself is decide that my day revolves around excercise. So half way through my day, I walk to the gym (2+ miles), do a workout, and walk back from the gym. My plan is to do this daily. I then EAT only when my body demands it instead of on a schedule. I also try to limit my portions and eating out does not promote limiting portions. Getting out of the house is important so go out... but not for food. Good luck, Joel

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

I'd like to point out that these "Intolerant, biased, Christians" didn't riot as a result of your criticisms. That means your biased opinion has been tolerated and appropriately ignored by them. Ironic. Even ignorant free speech like yours is tolerated. I find it even more ironic that its okay to bash this group with your "hate speech" without anyone saying anything. If you were to single out any other demographic this way that you'd be chastised for it. You advocate a double standard but I suppose you're too ignorant to see that, too.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

I love having my code in the cloud. I have 4 computers that I use the same code from and it syncs automatically between them. A lot of times, those computers are on networks that are completely unrelated by location or by domain. So, I can check my code in from an implementation site on my laptop and pull it down on my dev Desktop back at work. I develop in a 1 man shop (me) so any TFS implementation had to be maintained by me. That's waaay to much overhead for just little, old me. If you want to talk security... blah, I get paid for getting the job done. If someone thinks my code is so interesting that they go through the pain of hacking MS for it... then, they'll be sadly disappointed. Also, each of my dev computers have a copy of the code so if they delete the Web at some point (or it gets hacked and untrusted) I still have my own backups. Good Luck; You'll need it

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

... and a Gerital.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

You must be a joy to have as a co-worker. :wtf: Oh no! Its 1/100ths empty. :wtf: Evidentially you've never written code in Notepad.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

Been there; done that. How many solutions will I need to develop to justify $5000 overhead? Here, I spent 4 hours taking that data and putting it in a spreadsheet. That'll be $6000.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

I agree with your conclusions but I don't agree that they don't care. MS is made up of a bunch of developers and we're developers. I think that's just a brash and over-extended generalization. Unless you're saying that you don't care about the work you do and you suspect that all developers are the same way. Just like the company I work for, they are priced at "what the market will bare". However, I do agree that its because we generally aren't the one filling the PO. Because we are one step removed they tend to get away with over-inflating their value. I'm just saying that it doesn't make business or logical sense that they'd price it with this much excess. Yes, Fleabay is likely my next step. Got a copy of MS Office 97 for sale?

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

You've missed the point. Developers are MS life blood. If I'm buying a MSDN subscription then I'm a pretty serious developer. As a developer I keep my customers coming back for more when I meet their requirements and if I do that using MS technology then the customers buy more MS licenses. Good business would be to let developers increase the MS bottom line by having them using more MS products in their solutions. Pricing their products out of a developer's solutions does not make any business sense.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

Has any looked at the MSDN pricing lately? I do some MS Office (excel) integration for my customers so it requires that I get their version of MS Office (all the versions; 97 to 2013) to program against. To have access to Office I need to upgrade from the MSDN Pro to MSDN Premium... which costs $5000 more! Can anyone explain to me how they can justify charging developers $5000 to integrate with their products? I'm not writing the president's speeches using these installs. I'm writing software so my customers will continue to use MS products and purchase licenses. :(( I don't understand. What am I missing... besides the money to do it? :((

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

So, we shouldn't discuss the pricing of the Visual Studio eco-system in a discussion area titled Visual Studio?

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

Has any looked at the MSDN pricing lately? I do some MS Office (excel) integration for my customers so it requires that I get their version of MS Office to program against. To have access to Office I need to upgrade from the MSDN Pro to MSDN Premium... which costs $5000 more! Can anyone explain to me how they can justify charging developers $5000 to integrate with their products? I'm not writing the president's speeches using these installs. I'm writing software so my customers will continue to use MS products and purchase licenses. :(( I don't understand. What am I missing... besides the money to do it? :((

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

Clearly written. What is hard is that I don't know anyone's background and if they are throwing around what they have heard or if it is something that they have studied and read for themselves. Assuming you are representing the later, now I'm curious how this compares to other professions. So, let me play with this for a moment with a few more hypotheticals. ...and keep in mind, I generally agree that what you state is true, but I'm exploring. Just because someing IS doesn't mean that it SHOULD BE. If I were a journalist working for the New York Times and I wrote a book on the side, does that book, by default, belong to the NYT? Do they have similar contracts that says everything you write is ours unless stated in this contract? Also, if I were a musician and I wrote a song while employed by Sony, by default would I also have no rights unless I had a contract that specifically stated it? It seems like this could be comparable scenarios (he said naively). What I'm driving at is the words "by default". Do the laws by default protect the corporation or do they protect the individual? Or, is there some "employee bill of rights" that actually does protect the individual and would apply to those who CREATE for a living? Or, is this just about working for the MAN?

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

If I use my own libraries in the solutions I provide to my employer then at that point I believe I give up all rights to them. At that point, I've made a program that will not run unless those libraries are there. So, by including them with the solution I've given up any rights to them. I'm now more convinced of this than ever because of a comment made above about liability. The company I work for takes on the risk and liability if my program goes terribly wrong for a customer. In that case, I don't want my name anywhere near the code... especially if they accuse us of doing something malicious. Because the company takes on the liability they have the entire code base.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

Good point. I'll keep that in mind.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

I think you lost the point. This code was mine before this company relationship started. The legal department vacuum I referred to is my company's. I have no legal agreement with them that says everyting I have ever done is now theirs.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

A form like that would not likely hold up in court... just like most non-compete clauses. However, I'm not a lawyer.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

I haven't signed an agreement like that. Obviously, what is created during work hours is theirs. However, if I have a business on the side of writing an IOS app that has nothing to do with my employer I doubt there would be any court that would try to argue that it belongs to the company I worked for. With, or without, a signed agreement.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

We have no legal dept. I signed no agreement.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

This is the first entry that gave me some logic. Thank you. You've helped correct my thinking. Mainly, #1. If I claim the code as my own then I could be liable. By working for a company that takes on that liability, it protects me from litigation. So, I don't want to claim the code as my own. I've always had the thought that code is in a legal grey area because it is the product of my knowledge but it is not the end-product. The end-product is the .dll or the .exe that is compiled in the end and the company owns the end product. They definately don't own my knowledge and code is somewhere in between. Of course I know that the stuff I write on company time is definately theirs. But, as I said in the original post, these libraries have been developed over my entire career. I may even have some that I made in school that proved to be useful (a long, long time ago). So, these libraries are my bag of tricks. The company I work for at the time gets my bag of tricks when I incorporate them into the solutions I produce. At that point, the code is theirs. #2 - I work for a small company that hasn't bothered making me sign anything. #3 - I'm not privy to that.

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer

When is the code I write mine? I work for a company that creates solutions for manufacturing. Recently, we had a 500 lb gorilla customer request a code walk-through. I'm fine with that... but then they asked for a copy of the code. My boss was okay with giving them the code because we were paid dearly for the project. However, like most of the developers I know, I have a set of "helper" libraries that I have developed over the years. Many of them were started prior to this employer and I'll take copies of them with me when I go on to my next employer. They will continue to evolve over my career. So, when we sold the code, I insisted that only the compiled .dlls of the helper files be given to them. They can have their soltion specific code but not my libraries. My boss was understanding and we moved forward. However, if he wasn't understanding and was a jerk-boss, do I have any legal standing over the ownership of this code? Thanks for your help!

Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer