Being a contractor / having your own company is not cheap. Its always hard to decide what to charge your clients but a good start is to figure out what your overhead is with just having a company. There are lots of costs associated so here is a list of some of them for the "average" contractor.Startup CostsIncorporation (By a lawyer. You can do it on your own for a lot less): $700-$100Licensing of software required Hardware required Monthly CostsBusiness Insurance: $100-$200 (basic insurance. not errors and omissions which is more expensive)Payroll (income tax and cpp. you do not have to pay...

Seeing as how every one is talking about Windows Developer Tools Day, I thought I would contribute one of my favorite unheard of tool.... dataset quickwatch. Dataset quickwatch allows you to right click on a dataset variable while debugging and bring up a datagrid of a dataset while debugging which is great for any application that uses datasets. On the current application I am on I would be lost without it.

I should blog more on deployment stuff using the built in stuff in visual studio. Its not great but it still is fairly powerfull. Today I ran into a fairly common issue that not many people seem to have a solution for (besides creating a whole new setup project): "Unable to get installer types in the C:\blah\blah.dll assembly. --> One or more of the types in the assembly unable to load" The reason that this error happens (for me) is that my custom action in my deployment has depenancies that are not installed on the target system. The MSI first extracts the...

One thing that has bugged me with .NET development is making a class that I am using over some boundry (i.e. com+ / remoting / web services / etc) and getting the exception that the class I am exposing is not marked as serializeable. Its simple to fix but still a pain. I have been trying to think of a good reason why classes were not serializeable by default. There should be no performance issue with this as the only time an object should be checked if it needs to be serialized is... when it needs to be serialized. You...