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to warn future developers
Tuesday, September 25 2018
Today at work continued where I had left off yesterday, diving deeper into the C# and doing my best to debug despite serious handicaps. I couldn't get Visual Studio's built-in web server to serve the backend services, so none of its debugging capabilities were usable, particularly its console window, which would've been a handy thing to post messages to. Without that, I was forced to debug using the file system, a tricky method I've used in the past with backends that produce CSV. Fortunately, the file system is always available, even in compiled code running far from a development environment. Using this method, I was able to track down the problem to a missing parameter coming from one of the models. My contact for working with this code was a guy named John, and when I presented all I'd found to him, he suggested the fix might only involve adding a single line of code. Looking into this matter, I discerned what that line of code should be by looking at other models. Adding it fixed the problem, though the "fix" needed to be more than that, so I added a bunch of comments to the (mostly comment-free) code I'd been looking around in to warn future developers (including, perhaps, older and wiser versions of me). Then I turned my attention to my appalling development environment. Yet again, I found Google not to be helpful. Another problem with GUI-heavy configuration systems (in comparison to ones that can be manipulated solely with commands typed into a console) is that it's difficult to put into words the things you are seeing on the screen. And sometimes those things are not there (because of either the state of some hidden preference or seemingly-spiteful UI changes). But John soon set me straight. It turned out that all I needed to do was to go into the Visual Studio's project properties and set the web server dropdown to "Local IIS." Nobody had made any mention of that on any of the StackOverflow threads I'd found.
I'd come into work kind of early, so I left kind of early, driving the Prius home in the pouring rain. A little before I got home, Gretchen had left to attend to a meet & greet for the New York State Senate candidacy for Pat Strong being held at the Golden Notebook in Woodstock.
There was still some chili leftover from that pot I'd made on Sunday, so for dinner I made myself four Stand 'n' Stuff tacos topped with shredded cabbage.
Our electrically-powered just-in-time hot water heating system has been somewhat unreliable for years now, which is a bummer when the boiler is off for the season, it's been overcast for days (thus no solar-heater water), and one wishes to take a bath. Fortunately for me, tonight the electrical heater was working just fine.
This evening on Jeopardy one of the contestants looked like Ray and another was named Nancy. Gretchen always picks someone to root for, and tonight she chose Nancy even though she was a white woman from Texas and "Ray" was an Asian minority (usually, all else being equal, she roots for the minority). To Gretchen's delight, Nancy was the victor.
For linking purposes this article's URL is:
http://asecular.com/blog.php?180925 feedback
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