Here's – nnish! Nishanth Anil

Everyone say “Entrepreneurship isn’t easy and not meant for all”. As an experienced kid I do agree. But why isn’t it easy for all? When college drop outs like Bill Gates, Steve Jobs and Mark Zuckerberg can do it then why can’t others? I looked back to see what went wrong in my case. I am writing this down so that, I don’t forget these in my next venture. If this helps you do let me know.

Have A Great Idea, But Sellable –
Just because you have a great idea, it doesn’t mean that you have customers for it.It is important to have a market. Identify the need, make sure your solution is unique and deliver with quality.

Have A Vision -
Vision is the key. If you have an idea and a market you are sure shot to go. But will you sustain? Can you resist the change? Vision is not just a statement you need to add it to your about us page. It should be the one which you strictly follow at every stage. Have milestones and look back if you are aligned to the vision.Make sure every one in the company values the vision and follows it. Write down your vision on the paper and put it into a the board discussion. Remember how Microsoft is committed to its vision “Computer on every desk and in every home”. Today almost every one has a computer which is personal and running a Windows in it.

Choose Right Partners -
Your best friend is not always a right business partner for you. Because you care for your relationship you shouldn’t bring him/her into your business- That’s why they say “Mind Your Own Business”. Money plays a major role in business and but in relationships it is negative. So if you care for them then DO NOT. Your partner is one who stays by you during success as well as failure. Usually it happens the other way when you have your friend in business – He stays with you during success but blames you when you fail. Your partner should think like you, have passion like yours, should be committed like you and should have his/her own capability to make things right. Things fall into place faster when you have partners in different domains like marketing, technology, human resource etc. As they say the Lions, Tigers and other animals constitute a Jungle .

Plan Your Capital, Have A Business Plan -
$$$$Money$$$$ Where is the money to invest? What if i loose? I am a family man. The fear – setback. “Money is everything” Money is not everything but money is needed for everything. Its not right to believe that only a rich kid can do a business. Anyone with a smart business plan can do. A business plan is a written description of your business’s future. It should have key inputs like:

1. Executive summary
2. Business description
3. Market strategies
4. Competitive analysis
5. Design and development plan
6. Operations and management plan
7. Financial factors
*source: entrepreneur.com
If you have the fear of investing but you believe in your idea you still can do a great business. I agree that you cannot bring in huge capital into your business, instead approach a venture capitalist with your business plan. Convince him on the Return On Investment(ROI), if it interests him; he will help. VCs just eat up your stake because they are the risk takers. Don’t be greedy just sell your idea and give returns.

Hire Smart People -
Hire smart people on board and give them your best – the Google way. You should have managers who understand your business, maintain business secrets and take right decisions for you. Do not get involved in micromanagement it spoils everything. If you have hired a smart guy, you should leave the decision to him. Make them feel special and motivated at every stage. They are not just your employees, they are the people who are committed to you and the company. They are the reason for your success and you are the reason for the failure.

Have A Process -
You need not be a CMM level company to have a process. If you define a process now, you don’t have to repent later. Your process need not be complicated, but simple enough to take care of everyday activity. In your process make sure you keep milestones and measure your progress.

Change is Constant
Keep changing with times. No business can last long everything has a saturation. Identify the change early and get ready for the future. Once you have the idea which is already in the market, a great vision, hired smart people, and put a process in place then whats your job? – Smell the future, plan, and get ready!

These are just few of the points I remembered when I looked back at my failure. May be this is just right to my situation. Let me know if you guys have some other key points that I should keep in mind.

Some resources:
5 Myths That Can Kill a Start-Up
Entrepreneur

Cheers!

Loading an animated gif into WPF has been a challenge since the version 1 release. WPF does not support loading an animated gifs directly into an declarative <Image> or by code, and hence developers have come out with various workarounds. Some use a raw technique – writing few lines of code which extracts the frames of the GIF and animate them.  One other way to do is using the <MediaElement> FrameworkElement which is in the namespace System.Windows.Controls. <MediaElement> wraps the MediaPlayer class for declarative use and hence it supports both audio and video files. Using MediaElement you can load the animated gif the following way:

Remember it is important to use “file://” and an absolute path for loading the gif. So you cannot embed the image to a resource file and now you know one of the limitations of it. Every approach does have advantages and limitations of its own, its important to use the right approach based on the project needs.

Another possible way is by making the working Jack do the trick – Yeah I meant lets go back to Win Forms picture box to do the magic. We know PictureBox seamlessly loaded the animated gifs in Win Form days. Wait a minute did I say lets change the project from WPF to Win Forms? No I didn’t. What I said is lets integrate the PictureBox alone to the WPF project. To use the right word, I should say that we need to host the Windows Forms Control in WPF. To host a Windows Forms Control you need to make use of the class WindowsFormsHost which appears in the System.Windows.Forms.Integration namespace in assembly WindowsFormsIntegration.dll.

Lets get to the code. The first step to do is add a reference to System.Windows.Forms.dll and WindowsFormsIntegration.dll to your WPF based project.

Add the following namespaces to your XAML Code.

Now you can host the PictureBox inside the WindowsFormsHost and set its Name.

In your code behind(Window1.xaml.cs), add this code to the Window_Loaded Event:

Key points before execution:

1. Make sure you provide the right path to load the image
2. You can also load it from a resource file.

Since Windows Forms has several interesting built in controls that WPF lacks, using this technique you can make your favorite Windows Forms control work in WPF.

Cheers!