If you want to prove you are really delighted with my help or simply you have too much spare money , it’s possible to pay me a kind of tip. That can be a dollar or two, that’s not really important; every little helps. All in all that could help pay for the hosting.

Of course I’m still blogging for fun so treat this as a feature – use it only if you really want to

Wiadomym jest, że to osoba która zarabia w programie Google Adsense jest odpowiedzialna za sprawy podatkowe. W moim przypadku nie są to duże pieniądze, ale zacząłem się zastanawiać w jaki sposób mam postępować by nie mieć problemu z Urzędem Skarbowym.

Znalazłem ciekawy post Google Adsense – Podatki i jego kontynuację. Autor tego bloga wspomina dwa utarte schematy: (po szczegóły zapraszam do lektury tych dwóch postów, bo autor się postarał; ja tylko w skrócie):

1. jeśli w danym miesiącu dostaniesz przelew z Google Adsense, masz czas do 20. dnia następnego miesiąca na zapłacenie podatku od tej transakcji; do końca kwietnia następnego roku wypełniasz PIT-36 (bo miałeś dochody z tzw. innych źródeł)
2. wypełniasz PIT-36 (bo miałeś dochody z tzw. innych źródeł) i płacisz podatek od wypłaty z Google Adsense tylko raz, dopiero podczas składania deklaracji podatkowej za rok poprzedni

Doradca finansowy poradził cytowanemu przeze mnie autorowi, że pierwszy sposób jest słuszny. Żeby było trudniej / śmieszniej, ów doradca napisał, że naczelnicy różnych Urzędów Skarbowych aprobują różne (z podanych wyżej) rozwiązania.

Postanowiłem, że sam spróbuję się czegoś dowiedzieć i zadzwoniłem na Krajową Informację Podatkową. Numery infolinii to: 801 055 055 lub 0-22 330 03 30. Tam powiedziano mi, że jeśli prowadzi się działalność gospodarczą należy podążać za opcją #1, w przeciwnym razie za schematem #2.

Oczywiście powyższy problem nie dotyczy tylko Google Adsense, ale każdej formy zarobku na własnym blogu lub stronie internetowej w ramach współpracy z instytucją, która nie płaci podatku za Ciebie.

Uwaga: Proszę mieć na uwadze, że jestem programistą a nie fachowcem w dziedzinie podatków. Informacje przedstawione w tym poście są moimi prywatnymi opiniami i nie stanowią rekomendacji postępowania. W razie wątpliwości / pytań sugerowałbym udać się lub zadzwonić do swojego Urzędu Skarbowego, lub zadzwonić na Krajową Informację Podatkową.

Let me describe my blog in numbers, if you like:

• 27 months – first post was published on April 14th, 2007
• 148 posts
• 435 comments
• I started tracing visitors (with Google Analytics) on March 16th, 2008 (a year after first post) – 210,000 visitors ever since
• best referring sites: google search (172k visitors), dzone.com (3k), reddit.com (2.6k), bing search (2.5k), yahoo search (2.2k), stackoverflow.com (1.2k)
• 1 DZone Big Link: Exeptions and Errors in Java
• I have been invited to DZone?s Most Valuable Blogger lodge (more details)

Many thanks to all that have helped achieving these results. Thanks for thank-you comments, crutial remarks and suggestions to what I’ve published, and just visting my site.

Cheat sheets will never replace books, full time trainings or tutorials – they are meant to be short and brief; supply the reader with the basics and summary; simple enough. You won’t learn the subject in details but DZone refcardz are worth giving a try.

I can see several usage models: (i) get a general meaning on a subject new to me (if I like it, then I go for it in details), (ii) refresh something, (iii) get back to it when in need of checking something quickly.

DZone Refcardz homepage: http://refcardz.dzone.com

Now, how to fetch the email? It turns out it is not that easy – it’s not supported by .Net BCL. I spent a while researching for the best library that matched my purposes and I want to share my views on a couple of components I looked at.

Note: Please bear in mind I was interested only in a small piece of functionality such library could provide. My need was only to fetch an email (in plain text) with attachments. That was supposed to be done via POP3. I was not really interested in features like advanced sending emails (e.g. email templates), request and delivery receipts, support for iCalendar, email in HTML, etc. To sum up, I did not test libraries from that angle and therefore this comparison will not suit needs of all developers.

CSLMail v2.0

WinToolZone has released CSLMail. It’s easy to use and quite convenient but I had two major problems:

• retrieve email body – problems with MIME format – the retrieved text contained equality characters in several places, and mixed line endings ‘\r\n’ vs. ‘=0A=0D’ (although each line of the email was prepared in exactly the same way). Combination of search/replace? Forget it – too risky
• attachment – when I was trying to fetch email with an attachment, the code just threw an exception (there was a problem with String.Substring call while fetching the message)

It is possible the problems were on my side only (e.g. mail server), but anyway, it didn’t work It’s a pity there’s hardly anything on internet about that component and I failed to get more help from the package I had downloaded from CSLMail homepage.

If you had similar problems or, on contrary, everything worked fine on your side, could you please share your opinions?

OpenPOP.NET

This library is available at sourceforge. I was able to fetch a TXT email with an attachment, but the email text was seen as an attachment (I could live with it) not anything like a body. The attachment, though, was not retrievable at all.

Again, maybe it’s my fault but I couldn’t fix it in a reasonable time. So I gave up again…

Mail.dll

Mail.dll is not available for free but there’s an evaluation version available to download so before you buy it you can check how it works. That version adds an annoying string to email subject so, in general, if you can leave with it you can stick to it. However, I’m afraid for more professional use that’s not an option.

A few comments:

• fetching emails with attachments was really easy and worked like a charm
• automatic email parsing when fetched from server – I get exactly the same text Outlook displays
• extensive examples – series of use cases shown in dedicated Visual Studio solutions (available in the package) and a lot of useful information on the author’s blog
• it’s not free tool, but probably is worth its money; also evaluation version is available

C# Mail a.k.a. HiguchiMail

• available at CodePlex, for free
• no problems with fetching email with attachment; both email text and attachment easy to retrieve
• comment in source code is written by Japanese
• even if there’s a problem there are lots of posts on discussion forum

To recap…

In my opinion Mail.dll and C# Mail are the winners in this competition. Perhaps the former is more advanced, better documented, and even easier to use. It might fit better for commercial / more advanced use. However for basic actions with POP3 you can save a few Euro and go for free C# Mail.

All in all, VSMDI files are really helpful but…

1. After a while there are several VSMDI files (MySolutionName1.vsmdi, MySolutionName2.vsmdi, MySolutionName3.vsmdi, …) in your project although only one is in use (and therefore added to source control). This is a known bug discovered in Visual Studio 2005. More information can be found there.
2. Painful merging. Merging can be smooth or really painful. It is the latter with VSMDI. Sorry, with VSMDI there’s no such thing like merging. If you discover someone else has changed and checked in VSMDI file (conflict), just replace your local changes with server version and repeat your changes.

   The reason for the mess here is each test is given ID which is a GUID which tends to change once in a while.

3. Not runnable tests. This doesn’t happen too often but I’ve experienced it several times already. When you try to run some tests you are told they are not runnable because there are multiple tests with the same ID (again, IDs…) – see below. Of course you haven’t played with IDs…
   

   At least this is an easy one (but not when you see that for the first time). Just refresh the whole test list view – select List of Tests in Test List Editor window and click refresh.

Ok, so that’s my list. Any points to add here?

But today I got pleased even more! I was noticed again; I received invitation to join DZone’s Most Valuable Blogger program. What it is, according to DZone:

DZone’s Most Valuable Blogger program brings together a group of highly talented bloggers, authors, and technologists actively writing about topics of interest to the developer community. These people are recognized in the industry for their contributions and deep technical knowledge on subjects ranging from software design and architecture to programming on a range of platforms including Java, .NET, Ruby and others.

You can see the list of MVBs at Meet the DZone MVBs. At the moment there are about 200 people listed and, as far as I have noticed, only a couple of them lives in Poland.

Update, 2010-07-12
I am now officially an MVB!

Update, 2010-07-23
Just got an MVB t-shirt too

Solution

First of all it’s worth checking VSTS Source Control related settings according to this article. In my case everything was fine there.

The problem on my side was somewhere else. After I had gone offline I had to go online again (what a surprise?!). I was expecting that to happen after reconnecting to TFS, but that is not entirely true. What I had to do as well was use ‘Go online’ button at the top of solution explorer. Once pressed it listed all the files I had modified while in offline mode and VSTS started working as before.

If you are struggling with this problem you are probably running 64bit OS and executing 64bit exe that loads 32bit dll, or the other way – 32bit OS on which 32bit exe tries loading 64bit dll. For the sake of this post, let’s assume this is the former matter.

Solution

You need to assure that 32bit dll is loaded by the program with the same bittness, even if it’s running on 64bit platform.

In order to achieve that you need to change the configuration settings of the project whose outcome is that exe so that platform target is always x86, disregarding configuration platform. Let’s assume that program is written in C#.

Open project’s properties, go to Build tab and make change as below:

There are two events CButton supports: (i) ON_BN_CLICKED (single click), (ii) ON_BN_DOUBLECLICKED (double click). Let’s assume you provide a meaningful implementation for a single click and do nothing in the event handler for the double click (empty method’s body). The result if a single click is obvious, but what will happen if user double clicks the check box (or the other CButton representation)? There are two possible answers (assuming the check box was unchecked initially):

1. Check box will be checked, and then unchecked – a simulation of a double (single) click
2. Check box will be checked only – one action takes place now

The correct answer is 2. When you analyze the behavior in details (using a debugger or logging) you will learn that when you perform a double click two event handlers are executed in the following order: ON_BN_CLICKED, and only then ON_BN_DOUBLECLICKED. So the former makes the check box checked while the latter does nothing (because of no implementation provided).

Let’s assume you really want a double click to be handled as if user clicked the check box twice (two single clicks). The easiest way to achieve that is to supply both event handlers with the same implementation. Perhaps this is not the best solution – what is supposed to be done is done, but user is getting an impression the check box works slightly different that they are used to. However, all in all it works

Any better workaround?