I ended up turning down the bid I won on RAC for that SQL Server Backup project.  It ended up being that the guy was using MSDE and, eventually, would be using SQL Express and simply wanted to back up his databases locally.  I’ll admit, that made things a lot less interesting.  I had nearly finishing making something to handle that on SQL Server 2000, but doing that on one of the desktop based SQL environments (MSDE or Express) would’ve been way too large of a rewrite for only $30.

I used to do a lot of locally run applications to do helpful stuff, but now that I’ve been spoiled with server-based solutions, a lot of the local stuff just seems so…. cheap, you know?

Scheduling backups of MSDE databases via some application running in the system tray that emails someone via an external SMTP server just strikes me as an application I don’t want to get involved in.  I do have standards, you know?  At least for stuff I’m going to work on in my spare time.  After all, time is money…. but my free time is worth more.

UPDATE:

I just got a reply back from the guy whose project I declined.  He made a comment about how unprofessional it was to back out on him, since he’s already put funds in escrow and that I’ve now made him waste 2-3 days on the project.  What the heck? He only even accepted my bid a few hours ago!  So I wrote back in order to clarify things:

There’s a 24-hour grace period where the coder may choose to decline a project for any reason without penality.  You can read more about it in the Seller contract.  I already submitted this to RentACoder so they can send your funds back.
As for your 2/3 day loss, I’m not sure if I follow you. You accepted my bid tonight and, one hour later, after I found out the environment you were running under, I responded saying I would not be taking on the project and declined the bid through RentACoder.  I’m sorry if you view an hour of waiting as unprofessional.

In any event, the whole point behind the grace period is for this sort of situation. SQL Server and MSDE/Express both use SQL tables, but solutions for them vary greatly at times.  My proposed solution to you, which was server-based, used code I already had ready for you, which is why I agreed to a low bid amount.  Building the project from scratch for MSDE/Express changes the development time to more than I wanted to invest on a $30 bid.

Thanks.

I feel bad for the guy, but is it really that big of a deal? Not really…  Apparently, he didn’t know about the Grace Period thing.  And he agreed that I had some valid points, so things ended alright, I guess.