That’s Just Embarrassing
My colleague said it best when I presented him with this gem.
Public Function IsSatelliteConsolidatedForDate(ConsolidationId As Long, EffectiveDate As Date) As Boolean
If ApplicationSupport.DataAccessProxy.IsSatelliteConsolidatedForDate(ConsolidationId, EffectiveDate) Then
IsSatelliteConsolidatedForDate = True
Else
IsSatelliteConsolidatedForDate = False
End If
End Function
Gabe: Unnecessary...
Thomas: wow!
Thomas: Maybe we should consider that as a design pattern
Gabe: what would we name the pattern?
Gabe: WhenTrueIsTrue?
Gabe: IGetPaidByTheLine Pattern?
Thomas: WhenYouNeedMoreLinesOfcode
Thomas: that's just embarrasing
Crystal Reports, I Hate You OR Let’s Talk About Sex, Baby.
This is a follow up to my previous posts about Developers being shot. Because after a hard day of debugging the little things start to pop out more and more. Maybe it's not even so much the debugging, but the report I'm forced to maintain. The devs before me have created a hajillion subreports on this Crystal Report. This is a maintenance nightmare. Also instead of passing a parameter to a command object, they decided to read a view that collects all kinds of irrevlevant data, ship it across the network and then filter it on the report side making the report unnecessarily slow. By pulling the views into Command objects and feeding them parameters, I'm able to speed up the current reports by a magnitude of 10. Alright great. Unfortunately, even though I have named the command object the same as the view that was being called I've lost ALL of the subreport links. So now I have to manually go through each subreport and redefine the link. I wish I could see more than just the command name in this screenshot. There's absolutely no way to make that window bigger. W T F.
The only thing I hate MORE than not being able to resize the window is that if you actually want to verify which field you've linked up to in the subreport you have to actually maneuver your mouse around the drop down options. If you don't the mouse will trigger the vertical auto-scroll. The program also changes your selection based on mouse.hover, so in order to not change your selection you have to follow the little red arrow on the right. And while I'm at it, look at what these lazy idiots did. They just copied and pasted the fields. So I have like 50 SSN fields all over the report and I really have no idea which one corresponds to which value. ARGH. One of my other reports is completely labeled with SEX-XX. So I spend hours repeating to myself "sex zero one, sex zero two". Not my idea of dirty talk.
You Developers Need to be Fucking Shot
This is the second time in two days I've run into an issue where the error message tell me something of little value. When you throw an exception, include information about what caused the exception. Yesterday, I got burned by Oracle which threw the exception "Table or View does not exist." Thanks for the help, I guess I'll just find out which of the 50 tables I was referencing is missing through process of elimination. WHICH TABLE WAS IT?! I can just imagine the code next to where the exception gets thrown, the tableName variable sitting within local visibility.
Similarly, I got burned today by Crystal Reports. "Missing parameter value". I didn't write this dumb report and there's like 150 parameters in the report. How do I know which one didn't get supplied. ARGH! I'm fairly certain the answer was right next to the code where you threw the exception. Now instead of resolving the issue in a matter of minutes, the solution may take me up to an hour.
TFS Generating list of changesets
Yesterday I created a new build in TFS for one of my components. This new build would be a build specifically designed to ready the component for the Staging environment. I created the build after someone mentioned that one of the components on staging wasn't working and I had recently changed some of my build structures on TFS, so I need a new solution. The project I've been working on has been accumulating source code and data for just over a year. Combine that with several other organizational projects and that's alot of information on the back end. My new build was taking forever and seemed to be stuck or frozen on the "Generating list of changesets". I was wondering if I had done something wrong or if there was just a glitch. I stopped the build and restarted it. Still the build gets stuck while generating the changesets. I decided to do a quick search and found that Manish has identified this as a slow area. Thanks to Manish I decided to wait the build out. More than two hours later and the build finally completed. After the first initial build, all subsequent builds processed in one minute. Just need to get through that first build and let it build the relationships for the build I suppose.
Why more people don’t reach for help
Loading the help file takes FOREVER. In the time it took for help to load I checked my email, made this post and did a little extra waiting. I need to watch that F1 key.
Posting a new topic on a random forum takes much less time. Oh Google, you're making my desktop software so obsolete.
Mass Effect Shotgun/Assault Rifle Achievement
A little off topic here, but I searched around the net looking for this answer to no avail. So I thought I would post my findings here in case someone else was interested.
I think most people that play Mass Effect start with the Soldier class and unlock the Shotgun Expert and Assault Rifle Expert achievements early in their play throughs. I decided to start as an Infiltartor then later as an Adept. I've been playing my adept Shepard trying to get the character to level 60 (I'm on 59) and as a result have not had a chance to unlock the aforementioned achievements. The Pinnacle Station DLC was released recently and I wondered if the kills from the simulator would, since there would be many, count for these achievements. The definition of "kill" becomes vague when dealing with a virtual simulation inside a video game. Good news, they do. If you have yet to knock these achievements out and decided on picking up the Pinnacle Station DLC, this is a good way to get your weapons expert achievements completed. cool. 
ODBC on 64bit Windows
Been trying to deploy my app to the Staging area this week and I ran into more problems I wanted to share. My Crystal Reports objects weren't able to connect programmatically to the ODBC. I'm still trying to figure out what the issue is, but I ran into this bit of secret knowledge that I wanted to share from DevArticles.
In a 64 bit windows server operating system, there are TWO odbc managers. When you pull up the usual menu for the odbc / dsn system, it is for the 64 bit odbc manager, and 32 bit applications (vb 6.0) will not work using these dsn's.
This is where the 32 bit odbc manager is:
C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe
Now that's useful information. Especially since I'm still building 32bit apps.
WCF broken on deployment
I recently tried to deploy a WCF service to IIS7 on server 2008. I had to remember to Add the Feature WCF Activation under .NET 3.0 in Program and Features. Yet after I performed this task I was still getting the error message.
The type 'X', provided as the Service attribute value in the ServiceHost directive could not be found.
Chris Smith's blog reminds me that the .dll file needs to be present in the bin directory. I have TFS building my output directories and didn't copy the bin folder to the output location. I'll have to look into my configuration. oops!
Useless Comment for the Day
Public Function ProcessPenalty() As Boolean
'**********************************
'* Purpose: Initializes the process penalty and calls the functions to do it
'* Class name: cAutoPenaltyExtension
'* Parameters
'* Input: None
'* Output: None
'* Author: REMOVED
'* Created: 01/10/01
'*
'* Modification History:
'* Author: REMOVED
'* Date: 03/01/2001
'* Modification Details:
'**********************************
What does this comment even tell me? I already know that the method will ProcessPenalty, so how does adding to the comments "Processes penalty" improve the situation? Similarly of course it calls the functions "that do it". ugh. The rest is just a waste of code space mucking it up with terribly useless comments
Got Burned Today
I'm about an hour and a half into my work day and still haven't successfully loaded Visual Studio. Yesterday, I was trying to clear all my breakpoints via hot keys (CTRL + ALT + F9). Somehow while executing that command I fat fingered on of the keys that had to do with macros. Suddenly, my machine is processing unintended commands and error messages are firing all over the place. At that point it was the end of the day, so I just worked past the errors and continued debugging so I could finish out the day.
This morning I came in and Visual Studio wouldn't load. The error message was "Cannot load the recording macro project '' for the following reason: 'Visual Studio 2008Projects\VSMacros80\MyMacros\MyMacros.vsmacros' is and invalid or inaccessible macro project file Would you like to recreate it?" No matter what option I choose the IDE just sits there processing...something. There's no feedback so I have no idea what its trying to do. After diverting my attention for about 15 minutes to http://news.ycombinator.com, I came back to the same situation. At the point, I started doing some Google research which quickly reached a dead end. The limited number of suggestions point to a Visual Studio reinstall.
Alright! So now we're back in business right? No, this hasn't helped the issue at all.
When you answer the message, Visual Studio processes at 90% CPU. I had to run off on some personal business and I knew I was going to be gone a while so I decided to leave Visual Studio plugging away on this issue to see if VS would finish the process. After two hours, it still did not correct itself. So I continued on with my original observation. The path to the MyMacros seemed incorrect. I searched for the entry in my registry and found it at HKEY_USERS\...\Software\Microsoft\VisualStudio\9.0\vsmacros\RecordingProject7\Path. I changed the path to the absolute path where it was located then did similarly for the keys above titled "OtherProjects7". Once I fixed the path Visual Studio was loaded and I was back in business.