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Technorati Tags: Clarity Consulting , venture capital , entrepreneur I’ve attended a slew of tech conferences/unconferences, speaking events, happy hours, etc. over the last few months and noticed a theme. A lot of people view corporations as a sort of...

Check out my new article on Coding4Fun . It describes a game I built for an internal coding challenge here at Clarity.

We recently worked on porting the Exchange Web Services Windows Vista Gadget into an OSX widget. Exchange 2007 exposes functionality via Exchange Web Services, so why not take advantage of that to build something on the OSX platform? Despite my deep dislike...

Our office recently cut over to using Office Communications Server for our telephony needs, thereby replacing our old Nortel PBX. One of the side effects of this was that we no longer have a phone in our lobby for visitors to use to call the receptionist...

SharePoint debugging experience in WSS V3 can get annoying, when exceptions start looking like this generic message "An unexpected error has occurred" To enable stack trace similar to the ASP.NET error page, edit your web.config at C:\Inetpub...

If you're not familiar with the OCSDKWrapper project on CodePlex, it's a wrapper that encapsulates the functionality of the Office Communicator 2007 SDK - allowing you to focus on building your application instead of dealing with the "plumbing"...

Recently I mentioned Inbox Zero, a method of keeping your email inbox organized and uncluttered. Another useful organizational method I practice is what I call “Paper Zero”. Paper Zero is not using zero paper; instead it is a commitment to: Organize the...

Technorati Tags: Clarity Consulting , entrepreneur , accomplipreneur I just read an article that used the word “entrepreneur” at least 20 times in two pages (before I stopped counting). “Entrepreneur” and its sinister step-child “serial entrepreneur”...

For all my Orange County readers you might be excited to know that you now have another great option for getting your SQL content. Reza Madani is starting a new Orange County SQL Server Users Group and their first meeting is this Thursday, August 14th...

Here at Clarity, we hold infomal internal training events a couple times a month to discuss new technologies, tools, or other things related to software development. Recently, Don Peterson led a discussion on source control management strategies for development...

If you’ve worked on a software development project, there is a good chance you’ve either used or done everything to avoid using Microsoft Project. I avoid MS Project when I can and have developed my own Excel-centric task management system. However, as...

I’ve been reading an excellent book, Head First Design Patterns, which covers many of the Gang of Four ’s famous design patterns for software engineering from the Head First series own irreverent and creative perspective. Design patterns are great; they...

Fed up with the (un)reliability of Chicago’s rail transit system (the “ El ”), we’ve kicked around the idea of a crowd-sourced train tracking system for a while. Well, one of our fearless Consultants took on the task and created Where The El . The app...

Gary Farr, a consultant at Clarity Consulting, won first runner up in the RIA Run contest with his Retro Command entry. The RIA Run contest was designed to showcase knowledge of Silverlight 2 by building the hottest, next generation game. The winners...

Try the WhereTheEL alpha The past few weeks I have been spending some of my days creating a project we have discussed here at Clarity for quite some time: live tracking the trains of the Chicago "EL" system. Currently GPS data is not yet available...