Over the weekend I spent a fair amount of time working on finalizing an update to the West Wind Web Store. This was my main task and this tends to be a fairly major process because this is a packaged Web application and setting up and testing an app to be distributed this way is a major pain. Getting all the files in the right place making sure the source code works, that all the assemblies are accessible, getting the Virtual Directory installer updated etc. etc. Finally I have to test this which means switching Web sites and running through a complete setup and getting the thing running. It’s not a big deal – about a 10 minute thing, but doing it 20 times in the course of a day is a pain. <g>

While doing all of this – which is one of those “I have way to many Explorer Windows for copying files open” tasks – I also was updating tons of documentation for the changes that have happened in the business framework classes and the high level Store bus objects.

If you read this Blog occasionally you probably know that I’ve also been working a lot with Help Builder and while I was in the process of finalizing the documentation I ended up finding a number of ‘issues’ in Help Builder that needed fixing or improving. Some minor things, some ideas on how to make things a bit more efficient. As I was working I also found nasty bug in the VS.NET Addin, which all by itself is really a separate project even though it relates to Help Builder.

While working on Help Builder I found a fairly serious bug in my Fox WSDL parser which is plugged into a bunch of other software. Help Builder uses this parser to document Web Services. Well, one of the things I needed to document last where the West Wind Web Store Web Services. At 2am this ‘last doc task’ of course decided not to work.

So, now it’s 2am and I’m working on 4 projects simultaneously. None of them are in a state of a breaking off point and I’m continually jumping back and forth between all of them. 

The WSDL problem actually took me quite a while to figure out – WSDL is such a twisted back and forth format and just looking at the code and trying to remember any change made to that code gives me a headache. No one else to blame but myself for this one (except maybe the designers of the WSDL spec!) as it turned out to be simple missing namespace prefix. Trying to find that however ended up taking over an hour of stepping through the code trying to remember what the code does – you know how much fun it is to debug the content of XML nodes in the debugger right?

Too much is too much. I had enough for today. Some days are like that where every piece of code you work with has something wrong with it and needs fixing. Sometimes I don’t realize how involved all of this gets, until I come up for air – how am I keeping all these things straight? It’s exciting while it’s happening but sometimes, at some point late in the night it ends up hitting the wall and you just burn out and go blank.  My head hurts after this exercise.

It’s 4am and I still have ‘just a couple of things’ to take care of. Maybe this is not the time to do it. I’m bound to screw something up at this time in the morning <g>… Randy Pearson used to always joke about my build times being at some ungodly hour in the morning. Maybe he’s right – never build a shipping build at 4am!

So what am I doing here writing an entry into my Blog instead of getting some sleep? After this exercise I’m too keyed up – or rather my mind is too keyed up. If I go to bed now I'll be coding in my sleep and that's no fun at all! No, my mind isn’t in code mode anymore, but writing here as the last thing of the night usually lets me wind down some. Time to get out that meditation CD for the final lullabye…