The first task I completely failed on yesterday was switching from Kanbanery to Trello for the Kanban project management board. It is just so hard to switch tools like that in the middle of a project. I would need to export all of the tasks from Kanbanery and import then into Trello. That is just not going to happen easily as I have almost 50 tasks in 4 different columns. Something is going to get lost and I don't have time to fix stuff like that.
Part of this story is going to be easy as I can look at the Git log and see what I did yesterday! The big news for yesterday is that I got a new build for the mapping engine and was able to get it all working and showing 3 out of the 4 layers. I definitely like it when things just work. I tried a couple of times to get the images working and then just gave up and colorized the ones I needed to a fixed color. I looked at the iPad app Objective-C code to find the colors and the layer settings since we are using the same mapping engine. That exercise just reminded me how verbose and challenging Objective-C is to write an enterprise application. The code just hurts my head and is painful to read and to follow the flow of what is going on. On the other hand C# is very much like Java or ActionScript where you need to understand the framework, threads and events and you are done.
A couple of new challenges occurred yesterday. The first one was I had to learn how to split strings but that was very easy by reading the documentation. Then I needed to figure out how to create a new LINQ query with multiple where clauses. Back to the documentation and within minutes I yet again fell in love with LINQ. As I was adding this new LINQ statement, I was chatting with the mapping engine developer and he told me he worked on LINQ while at Microsoft. I quickly told him, he was now in the circle of trust as my favorite Microsoft developer. I have only met a handful of Microsofties but I have never lived in that part of the country either. Doesn't matter as still anyone involved with LINQ is near the top of useful people.
Another lesson while changing to use the new mapping engine API, was to learn how to read a file from the file system using Windows.ApplicationModel.Package.Current.InstalledLocation. That is interesting since working on web sites for so long you just forget that you can actually read and write files!
Everything considered, yesterday was a huge success so it was a very happy day. I was able to take a break and play tennis also since it was a nice spring day in the middle of December.
The hardest thing all day this morning was fixing images. I still do not have them working as I would like but I quickly made PNG files so I could verify my layers were displaying properly for the data values. I find that the easiest thing to do is use Gimp or Inkscape on my Mac, check the files in and then go to Windows and use Git to retrieve the files and then add them to my project. So much easier than waiting for SkyDrive which is not the speediest tool in the shed.
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