Unhandled Exceptions

Our current focus at work is the development of an XBAP re-write of our application.  We are leveraging essentially the same business logic and data access, but the UI is totally different.  Given the complete re-write of the UI portion, there are a good number of bugs and unfinished issues.  We are also, simultaneously, adding additional modules for a later version.  So the 8 of us in development are pretty much slammed between bug fixes and new feature development, which meant we weren’t getting very far.

So, the decision was made to split the dev team into fixers and builders.  My manager is leading the builders group, and I’ve been tasked with heading up the fixers group.  Hopefully, it won’t last long and we can get these bugs turned over.  But, in the meantime, I’m supposed to “crack the whip” and get the bugs fixed.

So far, everything is going fairly well, although we’re not fixing nearly as many bugs as I thought we could.  We are, however, making a huge dent, which is extremely good for morale.  As long as this trend continues we should be good to go.

As per usual, the end of the month will be a push to get my objectives done. Of the 5 I have, 1 is a bug-related one, which I am 2 bugs away from completing. The other is passing my MCTS test on Thursday morning, so that one’s scheduled too.

Two of the last three are documentation-related, and the last is just getting some work in on our purchasing module. I’m hoping that I can get the requisite hours in on purchasing, but given my bug fix count for the month (I’m at 120 fixes this month already), I may be able to miss that one by a few hours and still be ok.

Luckily, things at home are slowing down. Considering last weekend (Oct. 18-19) I spent a decent amount of time in the hospital with my wife, this weekend was much more relaxing. My wife and the little one inside her are just fine, but it was a crazy weekend. This weekend I got some studying in and started putting the base shoe back on the floor in the entry way (a task I had scheduled for last weekend).

As much as I don’t want to take this MCTS test, I’m looking forward at getting it over with. I’ve been studying the web stuff since May, not because I don’t get it, but because the summer and our latest product have sucked out all my studying time. I’m hoping to get the next test done before the baby gets here, but we’ll see.

I finally broke down and bought the latest copy of Quicken. I’ve been using Quicken 2006 Home and Business for quite some time, and decided it was time to upgrade. That and the 20% coupon I found persuaded me to get the Quicken 2009 Home and Business edition. The upgrade was really quite smooth, I didn’t even have to point it to my old Quicken files.

While I was checking out of the Quicken online store, they asked if I wanted there Home Inventory Manager for an extra $10. Dana and I had talked about getting a home inventory together, so I took a quick look at the app. For $10 bucks, it’s worth it. You can compile a categorized list of your stuff, including purchase/resale/replacement prices, categories, locations, and images of the item.

The new version of Quicken looks pretty cool, but I’ll have a better review in about a month.

I realized today that I haven’t posted here in a week, and nothing has been development-related for about a month.  There is good reason for that, but I’m not going to explain because it’s really just an excuse.

The last month has been really dedicated to finishing some of the feature development in our new product.  The new product is an XBAP application, so some of my time has been devoted to figuring out ways to implement features in partial trust. 

The end of the month brought my first foray into deploying the XBAP, which I know is going to be a pain.  Not so much because of creating virtual directories, etc, but because any time I change one of the files in the XBAP, the manifest files need regenerated.  I thought the Mage.exe tool would be able to help me with this, but it turns out the tool has a problem with regenerating hashes when the .deploy extension is used.  Overall, deploying this thing in an install format is going to be painful.

My current workload is solely bug fixing.  With our main focus on completing feature development, some of the lower priority bugs were overlooked, and now we’re forced to go back through and hit those bugs hard to clean them up.  I’m doing my part (19 cleared on Friday, and I’m hoping to hit 20 today), but I still have other issues to attend to.  Oh well, such is life as a developer, I suppose.

Given the amount of training I did, I should be happy to have finished better than last year.  My 5K split was pretty good for me (25:23, which would have put me in to finish under 51), but the heat got to me a little.  My final time was 53:06, which is about an 8:30 pace.  Again, faster than last year, but I had been hoping to do a little better.

No, it wasn’t exceptionally warm, but it was extremely humid.  I sweat a LOT, and running in humidity (with little to no wind) takes it’s toll on me.  No excuse, I supposed.  But it was an enjoyable morning.  Tomorrow it’s back to work.