Friday, February 25, 2005

Good week for coding

Lots of interesting stuff seems to have happened this week for coding. First we (basically) finished two major product releases. This allowed us to implement a couple of really neat tools. First, I have worked out a way of creating a CHM out of an XML extraction from the issue tracking system. This cuts a lot of time off creating release notes and the results are pretty good. I would like to be able to create a PDF from the CHM, but the products I have previewed seem to mostly suck. Maybe if I create a chunked HTML document we could use Acrobat to create the equivalent document, hmmm...

Started using the new SCM to manage the code lines. This is a vast improvement over the previous system (which produced branch lines that were entirely imposible to manage). Yesterday I created a major product release branch without a hitch. This will revolutionize the way be maintain our code. I can hardly wait to use it for our other my web product. It should allow me to reorganize the code base as well as making it a lot easier to rebuild and fix released versions. Up until now it had be a task only for the few gurus who would bother... mostly we would just try to install the lastest version and fix bugs there.

Got Eclipse 3.1M5 yesterday. I am very excited about the improved SWT drawing methods. This was the only thing that was missing to replacing my existing fat web client with an Eclipse RPC application. I see only advantages. I will have to try a code spike of drawing a VVF file to see if the performance is up to snuff or not (normally it should be, since it is a thin wrapper over the windows API, performance should not be a problem).

Did a lot of C# hacking today. Tried to apply some of the principals that I have been reading about in Holub. The more we think about what he has to say, the more (I think) it revolutionizes our coding practices. The only question is, will our code be better or worse... I suppose only time will tell. I think the idea of putting the Describe method in the IStorable interface will really change the way we think about interacting with our objects. This is the smartest thing that we have done on this code iteration (and we have done a lot of thinking about how to clean up our implementations). We hacked out a lot of lines of code today. I feel good about it for a change (even if it was C#).

Have to leave to the geo user conf tomorrow in Prague. It will be nice to visit the city (and drink a bit of beer), but I wonder what I am going to do there...

Friday, February 18, 2005

First Blog Entry

Well I think I am going to start to publish a blog. This is only a test entry. I hope someday I will have something useful to say.