A solid meeting

I went to the Silverlight Atlanta Meetup last night and had a very nice time. No answers on my data validation questions mind you, but a useful and engaging meeting. Apparently the next move for the group is to move to more of a conference room situation, which will probalby be even farther away.

Silverlight Data validation problems

So - I spent today making one last ditch effort to get the built-in Silverlight data validation to work in my project, all to no avail. I even posted a question on Stack Overflow, and have yet to receive an answer, which is a first for me. I downloaded several of the samples, from Wildermuth, Liberty and others, and they none of them would work out of the box, they all either had strange dependencies or would throw errors on build. I finally gave up and did the validation manually, the most recent version is on the site now. Granted, I'm trying to do remote data objects, so my situation and the examples are a bit different, but it would be nice to have some degree of success with this.

The Web Startup Success Guide by Bob Walsh

I recently read the Web Startup Success Guide by Bob Walsh and liked it. It was chock full of useful information and helpful tips about how to go from a programmer to an actual Owner. In the words of Michael Gerber, it helps you work on your business, and not in it.

Brief Thoughts

• The Venture capital chapter was quite informative, and reinforced my thought of "Are you sure you need this" regarding VC funding.
• The Social Media marketing chapter was excellent, and I have sent the link to the book to many of my friends in the advertising and marketing biz to help them get a handle on how to handle FaceBook, Twitter, and the rest
• For the most part the interviews were useful and informative, particularly Joel Spolsky's interview. For my purposes, a couple of them could have been removed with no damage doen to the book, but I imagine they applied to someone.
• The interview with David Allen was informative as well. Conversations about the GTD methodology tend to resemble Ayn Rand discussions on philosophy too much, but this interview worked for it's purposes

I recommend this book to everyone starting an ISV (like me!), or thinking about starting one. My only quibble is that there was no central guide to the links mentioned in the book, either as an appendix to the book or online. There were numerous mentions of useful websites, but it is easy to lose them as they are spread out all over the book. This is a minor quibble though. If you're reading this, and this applies to you, go ahead and buy it. You'll be glad you did.

Cross posted at the Digital Tool Factory blog.