This is like any other business (or should be). And if you treat it as such, then the cost will actually increase your profit. Successful businesses charge a margin above their costs. Your costs have increased by $5000, so you increase the charge accordingly.

MSDN doesn't provide you the development interfaces, it provides you full copies of the software (and usually multiple copies too). You can develop without MSDN. You could always just do without the MSDN subscriptions and just buy the individual components you need.

If I read that right, the employee has exclusive rights to a computer program (s)he creates, if the idea didn't even partially come from the company and company resources weren't used. That's pretty standard in the industry. Even using their electricity would give them the right to claim the program. But first they would have to prove you used their resources to create it. Even with security cameras, I'd think they would have a tough time proving you worked on creating a particular program at work on your own time. However, considering everything, even here, if you have an idea for a program develop it at home. If you don't have electricity at home work on the laptop until the battery runs low, take it to work, plug it in and work exclusively on company business. You can prove you used it exclusively for work and they would have a tough time proving you were stealing electricity to charge your battery.

Just so everyone knows... after this rant, I got the WiX installer to work on my Windows Service. The problem came down to naming. In one part of the XML I named my service "ScaleReaderSvc" and in another I named it "ScaleReaderService". I fixed that and everything came into order and I believe I heard angels sing... or the furnace kicked in and reminded me that it needed maintenance. Why the WiX installer gave me an authorization error for this typo is beyond me. This experience is like so many and explains why why I'm jaded against people that insist that XML is easy to use. "All you have to do is edit the XML"... oh, and by the way you also need to read my mind because there is no intellisense, you need to spell everything exactly right and keep it in the right context even if I name things in a goofy way or fail to follow a naming standard. Joel Palmer Data Integration Engineer