Unhandled Exceptions

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.

I ran an easy few miles this afternoon as my final run before the Great Race. I had wanted to avoid hills, but given the geography of this area, that’s pretty much impossible. I ran the 5K loop up to the church and through the park. I felt pretty good, and my time wasn’t all that bad (averaged about 8:30 per mile). I’ll probably lift tomorrow (maybe a little cardio, but no running).

Work has been rather hectic. I have an awful lot of quarterly objectives that I need to meet in the next three days, so I’ve been kind of busy pushing out new features and wrapping up some of my objectives. I don’t think I’ll have a problem finishing up, but it’s definitely going to be tight.

I have been using Trillian for some time because it allows you to utilize multiple IM clients (AIM, ICQ, MSN, Yahoo) in a single application. However, with my increased usage of Gmail, Facebook, and Twitter, it still seemed like I had too much open to do the same things.

Firefox has some add-ons like Twitkit and the GMail Manager that allowed some interactivity, but that mean that I had to have Firefox open all the time. Sadly, when I’m really focused on development, I don’t usually have that open.

A co-worker noticed my tweet about Twitter’s IM service being down for some time. He pointed me to Digsby, which is the current uber client for IM, Email, and several social networking sites (Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter are the only ones currently implemented). Given my new fascination with Facebook, I thought I’d give it a try. So far, I’m impressed.

The ability to tweet from the IM client works great (better than Twitter’s own IM bot). The integration into Facebook chat means I’m on Facebook chat pretty much all day, which is pretty fun. And, since my various email accounts (2 gmails, yahoo, msn, and a couple pop accounts) are easily manageable within Digsby, it looks like Trillian is out. It’s served me well, but the Digsby client seems much more integrated.

That’s my life in a nutshell. My wife and I put in an offer on a house (on a whim) which they accepted. We’re now in the middle of trying to sell our house so that we can pay for the other house. Yes, our purchase of the new house is contingent on the sale of our current home, so it’s not quite as hectic as it possibly could be.

What’s that mean? Well, my days are spent fixing bugs (and implementing features) in our new product in preparation for a release within the next month or so. My nights and weekends are filled with cleaning and fixing our current house. Our townhouse is only three years old, so it’s in wonderful shape, but there are some touch-ups here and there that need done (some drywall patches, a few paint touch-ups, and general top to bottom cleaning).

I’m getting a little burned out at this point, but hopefully we can sell this place and get into the new house before Christmas. Our fingers are crossed.