Tuesday, December 24, 2013
My son's latest artwork
My oldest son has decided to use Facebook to marketing his art work. He sent out a message to find out how many people would want a $10 portrait for the Christmas holidays. This is like right out of the Lean Startup MVP and he could care less about that book - somehow that was intuitive to him as the right thing to do - how interesting. From his Facebook responses he now has one $100 cow painting and a $200 unicorn painting commissioned. He has one more he must do for an undisclosed amount where he was told to do a painting and he would get well paid for it. The unicorn is going to travel to California so his social network has paid off quickly. My absolute favorite is the harpist and you have to see these in person to really appreciate them.
Saturday, December 21, 2013
From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 27
The hardest part of the day today is figuring out what music to listen to. Not really, now I have to watch my time wisely as I have run out of billable time on this project but I need to do more manual testing on the device being sued at the conference to make sure it is working in every way without any problems. It will not take tons of time but it has to be done whether I get paid for it or not.
The first thing I had to do this morning was recap the whole project in executive summary form to give to the customer in our final meeting on Monday. I actually enjoy doing that as it reminds me how much I accomplished the last month but I constantly have to remind myself of the target audience. Not too much technical detail but enough that a valid summary can be given from the details. Kanbanery has some nice reporting features that helped me some, but it also helped me since I constantly use it to record what is needed to be done and I move the tasks when I am done. Any customer interaction is recorded as comments, which this time also helped me with a couple of summary items.
As I was testing the final changes, it suddenly came to me that what I really need to do is create a perfect test file that has an example of every single value so I can double check on more time that everything is perfect. Now that I can load data from files that is just so easy to do. Time to get serious about my test fixtures. It must have been the time pressure of this whole project that we made not think clearly.
In order to get the list of all airports in North Carolina and Virginia, I tried several sources on web and then just found the airport lists on Wikipedia and used them. The list of IATA NC airport codes and VA airport codes was used to locate all of the commercial primary airports. I then used Flight Stats to look up the complete information exception altitude which I had to use Mrs. Google on each of the airports. Most of the time the airport code would work in the search, as in "RDU altitude" and if not then I would just search for the city and use the altitude I saw in any search results match so I did not have to click on any link in the search results. If all else fails then I go to U.S. Climate Data site which always has what I need. Then I got into a roll by using a search string of "zip code near ... airport" within maps.google.com and then entered the closest city name, state name and zip code into the Maps Easy web site to get the latitude and longitude. I then traversed the USA from Bangor, Maine to Los Angeles, California by picking major cities along the way. I then picked half way points between these 15 cities by approximating the halt way GPS coordinate. This simple GPS path of 31 points helped me find a couple more problems in the code, so it was all worth it even though it took me several hours to do it.
After a full day of work with numerous breaks, but still a full day, I am finally DONE.
The first thing I had to do this morning was recap the whole project in executive summary form to give to the customer in our final meeting on Monday. I actually enjoy doing that as it reminds me how much I accomplished the last month but I constantly have to remind myself of the target audience. Not too much technical detail but enough that a valid summary can be given from the details. Kanbanery has some nice reporting features that helped me some, but it also helped me since I constantly use it to record what is needed to be done and I move the tasks when I am done. Any customer interaction is recorded as comments, which this time also helped me with a couple of summary items.
As I was testing the final changes, it suddenly came to me that what I really need to do is create a perfect test file that has an example of every single value so I can double check on more time that everything is perfect. Now that I can load data from files that is just so easy to do. Time to get serious about my test fixtures. It must have been the time pressure of this whole project that we made not think clearly.
In order to get the list of all airports in North Carolina and Virginia, I tried several sources on web and then just found the airport lists on Wikipedia and used them. The list of IATA NC airport codes and VA airport codes was used to locate all of the commercial primary airports. I then used Flight Stats to look up the complete information exception altitude which I had to use Mrs. Google on each of the airports. Most of the time the airport code would work in the search, as in "RDU altitude" and if not then I would just search for the city and use the altitude I saw in any search results match so I did not have to click on any link in the search results. If all else fails then I go to U.S. Climate Data site which always has what I need. Then I got into a roll by using a search string of "zip code near ... airport" within maps.google.com and then entered the closest city name, state name and zip code into the Maps Easy web site to get the latitude and longitude. I then traversed the USA from Bangor, Maine to Los Angeles, California by picking major cities along the way. I then picked half way points between these 15 cities by approximating the halt way GPS coordinate. This simple GPS path of 31 points helped me find a couple more problems in the code, so it was all worth it even though it took me several hours to do it.
After a full day of work with numerous breaks, but still a full day, I am finally DONE.
Friday, December 20, 2013
From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 26
So here we are at the final day of work on what needs to be working for the conference. I ended the afternoon yesterday listening to Robin Trower and it was so pleasant that I am going to resume where I left off on Spotify this morning instead of trying to discover new music. The goal for today is to look at a couple of performance problems loading the data from the secure server and fixing the remaining two problems. It sounds easy but finding performance problems can sometimes be a big challenge. Of course the #1 task is to test, test and do more testing as it has to be super stable with no new issues introduced today when with anything I fix. As I work on this app, I constantly keep in mind that this is going to be shown to thousands of people and would I be happy to be there in person showing it?
After more than a month of working on this app, it still never ceases to amaze me when I find yet another super useful MSDN documentation page. This morning I was considering adding a hyperlink to my UI and so I used Ms. Google to search for "windows store xaml controls" and found this useful list of controls with thumbnails of what they look like with code used to create them. Then they have a list of all of the controls by function. Those pages are just so useful to someone starting out. Wait, that was me a month ago. I guess I am a little slow. It kinds of reminds me of the Adobe Flex Showcase. Some days I think there is definitely nothing new under the sun as the employees at Microsoft just learned from other tools what works well and then borrow the ideas and improved on them. I don't know which came first Adobe Flex MXML or Windows XAML but Apple Storyboards are the exact same idea and I know they came later than MXML or XAML.
When I was looking thru the controls list, I see they support tooltips. I still find this really odd on a touch device. I know from using Windows 8 that touch and hold results in a difference action from touching but that is not obvious since that gesture does not exist on Apple devices. Maybe it should be it does not.
Before going to too crazy, I wanted to go back to my existing Kanbanery stories and add references to the MSDN documentation on how I would solve the problems, just in case someone else picks up those tasks in the future. Even if it is me, then many weeks from now I am not going to remember what in the world I was doing.
The list of available components is pretty large and it was easy getting distracting looking at all of the examples to see what I could have used but did not for the UI I created, but I found what I need as it is called a HyperlinkButton. I think I am finally getting the hang of this. I then wanted to style the hyperlink as the default color just does not work with my themed colors. I could not find the styles off the main HyperlinkButton class documentation, but I found it right away in Ms. Google as I searched for "hyperlinkbutton styles xaml c#". I define the two brushes and then I run the app expecting easy success. I get the strangest error message I have not seen before:
It is time to do all kinds of manual testing to make sure the latest app is super stable. That is more important to me than adding any new features at this late in the game. I need a really stable app to deliver on Monday morning at my 9am meeting and I cannot work during the weekend, so bug free is very important.
At the same time I have to find out where the time is being spent processing data from the server as the time spent processing is pretty amazing when load the same data from local files. I must say that over the many years I have been doing this I have not found great benefit in using a performance analyzer as they are not to understand and take time to figure out what is being presented in the output report. I used to run analyzers all of the time in OpenGL development as they helped me. So, I decided to give it a try in VSE. They certainly make it so easy to run as I just select "Performance and Diagnostics" from the DEBUG menu. Download 6 hours worth of data and then stop the app and up comes the report. I really like the presentation as I can click on the column chart or select a region and the details below update to show the "Hot Elements" where most of the time was spent. The first time I selected "XAML UI Responsiveness" but the second time I selected "CPU Sampling". The later one was easy to explain as most of the CPU is spent in the mapping engine. Although those reports looked really good and had great interactivity, they did not help me with my problem at hand at all. And since I like to torture myself, I ran the amusing "Energy Consumption" report as well. The nice donut chart said it all "The session consumed approximately 139.09 mW-h of battery charge in 1.03 min. This rate of usage will drain a fully charged standard battery in approximately 5.23 hrs." - nice. The nice thing about this report is that I see "Wi-Fi Network" in the table with his blue bars of data that represent each of my downloads. I double click on them and I see another set of "Data Transfer" blocks and tool tips that tell me about each one as far as how much data transferred in each request and uploaded data which must be the request and acknowledgement responses. If I use my touch screen then I just tap on one of the blue blocks and the tool tip displays. Very nice - it does help me see one thing - the network is not the problem and the size of data is not a problem either. At least that helps me some. I look back at the donut chart and see that 59% of time was spent in CPU, 40% of the time was spent rendering data to the display and 2% was spent on network traffic. I went back into the "CPU Sampling" report and start poking around to see if any glaring problems came out. Although interesting and good looking, I need to add console log statements in my code and figure out what the delay is between getting the server data and starting the next download as that is my real problem.
In order to find the problem in my code I searched for way to get elapsed time and found the StopWatch class and added a Start/Increment/End calls and reran the app. Loading the data form the server took a total of around 44 seconds but reading the same data from files took a little over 1 second. To read 24 hours worth of data (around 65,000 data points with 18 values per point) took 20 seconds. Then I got brave and went back to loading 24 hours of data from the server and that took 4 minutes. I sent an email to the customer with this information. Now blinding fast but not horrible and the times are predictable and do not really vary much at all.
It took way longer than I expected to get the last issues resolved, but finally I am done and the only thing left to do is to have one final meeting and do the official hand off to the customer, but that is for another day.
After more than a month of working on this app, it still never ceases to amaze me when I find yet another super useful MSDN documentation page. This morning I was considering adding a hyperlink to my UI and so I used Ms. Google to search for "windows store xaml controls" and found this useful list of controls with thumbnails of what they look like with code used to create them. Then they have a list of all of the controls by function. Those pages are just so useful to someone starting out. Wait, that was me a month ago. I guess I am a little slow. It kinds of reminds me of the Adobe Flex Showcase. Some days I think there is definitely nothing new under the sun as the employees at Microsoft just learned from other tools what works well and then borrow the ideas and improved on them. I don't know which came first Adobe Flex MXML or Windows XAML but Apple Storyboards are the exact same idea and I know they came later than MXML or XAML.
When I was looking thru the controls list, I see they support tooltips. I still find this really odd on a touch device. I know from using Windows 8 that touch and hold results in a difference action from touching but that is not obvious since that gesture does not exist on Apple devices. Maybe it should be it does not.
Before going to too crazy, I wanted to go back to my existing Kanbanery stories and add references to the MSDN documentation on how I would solve the problems, just in case someone else picks up those tasks in the future. Even if it is me, then many weeks from now I am not going to remember what in the world I was doing.
The list of available components is pretty large and it was easy getting distracting looking at all of the examples to see what I could have used but did not for the UI I created, but I found what I need as it is called a HyperlinkButton. I think I am finally getting the hang of this. I then wanted to style the hyperlink as the default color just does not work with my themed colors. I could not find the styles off the main HyperlinkButton class documentation, but I found it right away in Ms. Google as I searched for "hyperlinkbutton styles xaml c#". I define the two brushes and then I run the app expecting easy success. I get the strangest error message I have not seen before:
WinRT information: Failed to create a "Windows.UI.Xaml.Media.Brush" from the text ''. [Line: 185 Position: 46]I looked in my resources XAML file and then at Git to see what I changed as that just did not make sense. I see the problem immediately as I started adding Foreground color to my Hyperlink button and had Foreground="". Sure enough I look at my MainPage.xaml file and on line 185 I found that half baked code. I compile the code and re-run it and it looks exactly as I intended it to. A little bit more code and I am done with that task.
It is time to do all kinds of manual testing to make sure the latest app is super stable. That is more important to me than adding any new features at this late in the game. I need a really stable app to deliver on Monday morning at my 9am meeting and I cannot work during the weekend, so bug free is very important.
At the same time I have to find out where the time is being spent processing data from the server as the time spent processing is pretty amazing when load the same data from local files. I must say that over the many years I have been doing this I have not found great benefit in using a performance analyzer as they are not to understand and take time to figure out what is being presented in the output report. I used to run analyzers all of the time in OpenGL development as they helped me. So, I decided to give it a try in VSE. They certainly make it so easy to run as I just select "Performance and Diagnostics" from the DEBUG menu. Download 6 hours worth of data and then stop the app and up comes the report. I really like the presentation as I can click on the column chart or select a region and the details below update to show the "Hot Elements" where most of the time was spent. The first time I selected "XAML UI Responsiveness" but the second time I selected "CPU Sampling". The later one was easy to explain as most of the CPU is spent in the mapping engine. Although those reports looked really good and had great interactivity, they did not help me with my problem at hand at all. And since I like to torture myself, I ran the amusing "Energy Consumption" report as well. The nice donut chart said it all "The session consumed approximately 139.09 mW-h of battery charge in 1.03 min. This rate of usage will drain a fully charged standard battery in approximately 5.23 hrs." - nice. The nice thing about this report is that I see "Wi-Fi Network" in the table with his blue bars of data that represent each of my downloads. I double click on them and I see another set of "Data Transfer" blocks and tool tips that tell me about each one as far as how much data transferred in each request and uploaded data which must be the request and acknowledgement responses. If I use my touch screen then I just tap on one of the blue blocks and the tool tip displays. Very nice - it does help me see one thing - the network is not the problem and the size of data is not a problem either. At least that helps me some. I look back at the donut chart and see that 59% of time was spent in CPU, 40% of the time was spent rendering data to the display and 2% was spent on network traffic. I went back into the "CPU Sampling" report and start poking around to see if any glaring problems came out. Although interesting and good looking, I need to add console log statements in my code and figure out what the delay is between getting the server data and starting the next download as that is my real problem.
In order to find the problem in my code I searched for way to get elapsed time and found the StopWatch class and added a Start/Increment/End calls and reran the app. Loading the data form the server took a total of around 44 seconds but reading the same data from files took a little over 1 second. To read 24 hours worth of data (around 65,000 data points with 18 values per point) took 20 seconds. Then I got brave and went back to loading 24 hours of data from the server and that took 4 minutes. I sent an email to the customer with this information. Now blinding fast but not horrible and the times are predictable and do not really vary much at all.
It took way longer than I expected to get the last issues resolved, but finally I am done and the only thing left to do is to have one final meeting and do the official hand off to the customer, but that is for another day.
Thursday, December 19, 2013
From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 25
Just when I thought I was done and could relax, I woke up today knowing I have to finish in a couple more days. I have today and tomorrow and then a weekend to be done. The good news is just as I expected the fix from my new found friend was waiting for me when I woke up. He had found the problem of the crash in his mapping engine code and had fixed it.
Now all I have to do it using his new DLLs and work my way thru all of the small issues I need to finish off. This morning I tried to poke around in Spotify to figure out what kind of music I felt like listening to and finally I arrived at Kirk Fletcher. He is the guitarist for The Fabulous Thunderbirds, so it is going to be a bluesy day today. That should help me a lot.
This morning I learned a new trick by calling "System.Diagnostics.Debug.Assert(false)" in my LINQ try/catch blocks I can see the stack trace when errors occur in the debug console. I have really de-generated in the past month as look at that crazy language I am speaking. I need to hurry up and finish this stuff to get back to what I really need to do and love doing and that it UX directed tasks. Enough of this programming stuff as it is not helping me!
I have several problems I must fix, so back to working on each one of these until I fix them all. Unless of course I need to go to sleep tonight and then I will leave some for tomorrow.
As I was marching down thru the issues, I actually found one in my own testing. When I was in hurry up mode, I could not figure out how to customize the Telerik Date/Time control to remove the header as I wanted my own text outside the control. I finally took some time and learned how to do that and it was pretty easy once I understood a bit more about component development in Windows 8 XAML from the Telerik documentation on the Date/Time control.
The next big lesson is that when creating a Grid you need to define the RowDefinitions and the ColumnDefinitions if you want the Grid to fill the remaining space. I am not sure why I thought that was the default but this is like the 5th time I have tried using a Grid and got frustrated when it did not work. I went back and the documentation exists but it is hard to find anything useful in there. I had to go back to the Quick Start Guide for Layouts as it was in there under the Auto and Star sizing. What a crazy name so that should prove another special keyword was needed instead of using a "*". On the other hand I really like the "2*" syntax to make a column two times wider than another - that is nice.
Now it is definitely to do a little complaining about VSE. I am sure there is a way to customize everything but the default action to increase/decrease the font size in the current editor is driving me crazy. The VSE default is for a two finger pinch to decrease the font size and the two finger extend increases the font size. That is not a gesture I deal with my my Mac so something I do changes the font size all of the time. It took me a while to figure it out - like a month!
The big lesson for the day is to always use a Grid since it is easier to adjust it that to use a StackPanel and then switch to a Grid. OK - always is a bit harsh but I don't know how many times in the last month I have started with a StackPanel because it was easy and then later on to switch it to a Grid. The real rule is if you have more than one row then create Grid.RowDefinitions and if you have more than one column then create Grid.ColumnDefinitions. Then all is well. Another very good rule is never try to nest StackPanel in a Grid or a Grid in a StackPanel as that just does not work without a lot of effort. This line in the documentation says it all:
Now all I have to do it using his new DLLs and work my way thru all of the small issues I need to finish off. This morning I tried to poke around in Spotify to figure out what kind of music I felt like listening to and finally I arrived at Kirk Fletcher. He is the guitarist for The Fabulous Thunderbirds, so it is going to be a bluesy day today. That should help me a lot.
This morning I learned a new trick by calling "System.Diagnostics.Debug.Assert(false)" in my LINQ try/catch blocks I can see the stack trace when errors occur in the debug console. I have really de-generated in the past month as look at that crazy language I am speaking. I need to hurry up and finish this stuff to get back to what I really need to do and love doing and that it UX directed tasks. Enough of this programming stuff as it is not helping me!
I have several problems I must fix, so back to working on each one of these until I fix them all. Unless of course I need to go to sleep tonight and then I will leave some for tomorrow.
As I was marching down thru the issues, I actually found one in my own testing. When I was in hurry up mode, I could not figure out how to customize the Telerik Date/Time control to remove the header as I wanted my own text outside the control. I finally took some time and learned how to do that and it was pretty easy once I understood a bit more about component development in Windows 8 XAML from the Telerik documentation on the Date/Time control.
The next big lesson is that when creating a Grid you need to define the RowDefinitions and the ColumnDefinitions if you want the Grid to fill the remaining space. I am not sure why I thought that was the default but this is like the 5th time I have tried using a Grid and got frustrated when it did not work. I went back and the documentation exists but it is hard to find anything useful in there. I had to go back to the Quick Start Guide for Layouts as it was in there under the Auto and Star sizing. What a crazy name so that should prove another special keyword was needed instead of using a "*". On the other hand I really like the "2*" syntax to make a column two times wider than another - that is nice.
Now it is definitely to do a little complaining about VSE. I am sure there is a way to customize everything but the default action to increase/decrease the font size in the current editor is driving me crazy. The VSE default is for a two finger pinch to decrease the font size and the two finger extend increases the font size. That is not a gesture I deal with my my Mac so something I do changes the font size all of the time. It took me a while to figure it out - like a month!
The big lesson for the day is to always use a Grid since it is easier to adjust it that to use a StackPanel and then switch to a Grid. OK - always is a bit harsh but I don't know how many times in the last month I have started with a StackPanel because it was easy and then later on to switch it to a Grid. The real rule is if you have more than one row then create Grid.RowDefinitions and if you have more than one column then create Grid.ColumnDefinitions. Then all is well. Another very good rule is never try to nest StackPanel in a Grid or a Grid in a StackPanel as that just does not work without a lot of effort. This line in the documentation says it all:
By default, a Grid contains one row and one column.The final task of the day is to learn how to style the Telerik date/time controls as the default blue background color is clashing with my default colors. Should be easy to fix since Telerik really has superb documentation on their control styles. Then of course I wanted to change the standard XAML slider colors as the purple is just a bit strange with the theme colors I am using. That took a bit more work to find the documentation and then it just show how great the Telerik documentation is as there are not illustrated screenshots that show the SolidColorBrush colors and where they apply to the XAML slider. I finally figured it out but it was a bit of hit and miss programming. Since this took too much effort I don't want to forget this technique:
To end the day I how to figure out how to combine two different dates into a single date. One had the date and the other had the time. Not an ideal situation but it was not all that difficult to merge the two into a single date. Enough for today as tomorrow will be my final day of work on this project it appears at the moment.
From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 24
I tried to get a few hours of sleep. I went to bed at 10:30pm exhausted and needing sleep. I have a big demo of what is working today at 9am so I wake up at 4:30am worried about the app still not working. Thankfully the mapping engine lead had worked thru the night, which sounds harsh but those are his normal working hours. This day is paid off. After a wake up shower I checked my email and sure enough there was 3 emails from him waiting for me. He had just got to bed when I was starting. He did not fix my problem but had several suggestions. After eating a quick breakfast and taking a deep breath I was ready to go at 5:30am. I had 3 hours to get it all working again so in I dig.
I had misunderstood how to use the mapping engine on Windows as it is very different from iOS in loading resources and managing threads. I needed to load all of the images up front and then create a map layer and only update the markers on the layer when it needed to be updated dynamically. It was time to start some major rewriting.
At 8:10am I finally got all of the map layers to display the markers correctly. Just when I thought I needed to hurry up and face a traffic jam on the freeway, I forgot that I have no access to the internet at my customer's office so I had to make an installable build and then email it to myself and then download it on the demo machine. That took me 30 minutes so I was in the car racing to the office 30 miles away. I turned on the radio and found out that there was a wreck half way there. The only problem by that time I heard about the wreck is that I had no other way to get there. As I entered the stand still traffic, I called my customer to let me know I would be late. I reached the office 15 minutes late.
The demo went really well and I entered tasks that were required to be fixed for the conference, where my app would be shown in the first week of January, as they came up in our discussion. There was a brief talk about running out of money but my main task was to find out what would make him happy for the final product I needed to have delivered to him. I definitely captured all of that important information. About half way thru the morning discussion a guest arrived who was the fellow in charge of the server API I was using to load the data. We discussed a couple of issues I was having and we decided to put a back up plan in the app to load 24 hours of data from local files on the computer in case the WiFi at the conference did not work, which is fully expected to have issues as it does every year! Good thing I added all of that code to read from files when I was stuck in a Starbucks with no working WiFi.
I visited another client only a mile away on the same road and the person I was supposed to meet was not there so I moved on. I decided to call my old work buds and have lunch with them since I was going right by their office and I needed a serious break anyway. Then of course I had to make my rounds and talk to everyone I knew that I saw in my old work building. Old is not really an appropriate word as there is nothing old about the building - maybe previous palatial mansion would be a better word. It was a great and well needed break from constant eating, breathing and sleeping Windows Store app code.
As I left my previous employers digs, I decided to drive to the Starbucks that had Google Business Class WiFi and call the mapping engine lead to see if he could meet me and help me work thru the critical issues. I was there less than an hour when he showed up.
For the next 4 hours we worked thru issues, crashes and general Microsoft debugging stuff I never wanted to know about. I had to read up a bit on using await and async in Windows Store apps. This is really a feature in VSE that is supposed to make asynchronous programming very easy. I must admit it is very easy but I needed to get a better understand since I was definitely seeing random crashes and thread problems. Some of the tools we used on his machine as these tools were so low level that they scared me and I did not want them on my machine. The first scary tool was called WinDbg and the reason it was scary is that you run the command and it changes registry settings and if you don't forget to change them back or remember how then your executable program will launch and then immediately enter into the debugger. Just the user interface alone was scary enough to just forget I ever saw it. The next scary tool was Application Verifier which seemed really super helpful but there again it changed registry settings. Anything that needs to change the registry is not going to happen on my machine. The mapping engine lead showed me how to enable checks to run automatically and how the reference app he wrote would fail all of the time. That is not what I wanted to know but I did see this tool's usefulness.
After 4 hours, I had even more tasks as I was basically testing the app the whole afternoon long as I was trying the duplicate the crashes I had been seeing. I found a couple of problems in my code that I immediately fixed. As I was fixing them we would discuss how I was doing things and he would suggest improvements. I recorded those in new tasks. This was the most important thing I could be doing as I need to make sure the app did not crash at all and was bullet proof for the conference. Finally after about 3 ½ hours in I got a crash. We had tried all kinds of things to get useful information on my machine when a crash occurred. We added a divide by zero in the code and could not find a way to get what we wanted. We looked at the system event log, VSE settings to allow debug symbols, basically nothing worked. Finally we found a setting in VSE File menu to saw the output as a debug dump file. My Windows laptop for some odd reason fails to read a USB thumb drive sometimes, so I had to reboot the machine and then it worked. I copied the 215mb dump file on the drive and gave it to him and he loaded it on his Mac pretending to be a Windows 8.1 machine. He has all of the Microsoft tools on his machine so was able to find out where the problem is, so I left Starbucks as I had to pick up my son at 7pm, but I knew he would find the problem for me.
I had misunderstood how to use the mapping engine on Windows as it is very different from iOS in loading resources and managing threads. I needed to load all of the images up front and then create a map layer and only update the markers on the layer when it needed to be updated dynamically. It was time to start some major rewriting.
At 8:10am I finally got all of the map layers to display the markers correctly. Just when I thought I needed to hurry up and face a traffic jam on the freeway, I forgot that I have no access to the internet at my customer's office so I had to make an installable build and then email it to myself and then download it on the demo machine. That took me 30 minutes so I was in the car racing to the office 30 miles away. I turned on the radio and found out that there was a wreck half way there. The only problem by that time I heard about the wreck is that I had no other way to get there. As I entered the stand still traffic, I called my customer to let me know I would be late. I reached the office 15 minutes late.
The demo went really well and I entered tasks that were required to be fixed for the conference, where my app would be shown in the first week of January, as they came up in our discussion. There was a brief talk about running out of money but my main task was to find out what would make him happy for the final product I needed to have delivered to him. I definitely captured all of that important information. About half way thru the morning discussion a guest arrived who was the fellow in charge of the server API I was using to load the data. We discussed a couple of issues I was having and we decided to put a back up plan in the app to load 24 hours of data from local files on the computer in case the WiFi at the conference did not work, which is fully expected to have issues as it does every year! Good thing I added all of that code to read from files when I was stuck in a Starbucks with no working WiFi.
I visited another client only a mile away on the same road and the person I was supposed to meet was not there so I moved on. I decided to call my old work buds and have lunch with them since I was going right by their office and I needed a serious break anyway. Then of course I had to make my rounds and talk to everyone I knew that I saw in my old work building. Old is not really an appropriate word as there is nothing old about the building - maybe previous palatial mansion would be a better word. It was a great and well needed break from constant eating, breathing and sleeping Windows Store app code.
As I left my previous employers digs, I decided to drive to the Starbucks that had Google Business Class WiFi and call the mapping engine lead to see if he could meet me and help me work thru the critical issues. I was there less than an hour when he showed up.
For the next 4 hours we worked thru issues, crashes and general Microsoft debugging stuff I never wanted to know about. I had to read up a bit on using await and async in Windows Store apps. This is really a feature in VSE that is supposed to make asynchronous programming very easy. I must admit it is very easy but I needed to get a better understand since I was definitely seeing random crashes and thread problems. Some of the tools we used on his machine as these tools were so low level that they scared me and I did not want them on my machine. The first scary tool was called WinDbg and the reason it was scary is that you run the command and it changes registry settings and if you don't forget to change them back or remember how then your executable program will launch and then immediately enter into the debugger. Just the user interface alone was scary enough to just forget I ever saw it. The next scary tool was Application Verifier which seemed really super helpful but there again it changed registry settings. Anything that needs to change the registry is not going to happen on my machine. The mapping engine lead showed me how to enable checks to run automatically and how the reference app he wrote would fail all of the time. That is not what I wanted to know but I did see this tool's usefulness.
After 4 hours, I had even more tasks as I was basically testing the app the whole afternoon long as I was trying the duplicate the crashes I had been seeing. I found a couple of problems in my code that I immediately fixed. As I was fixing them we would discuss how I was doing things and he would suggest improvements. I recorded those in new tasks. This was the most important thing I could be doing as I need to make sure the app did not crash at all and was bullet proof for the conference. Finally after about 3 ½ hours in I got a crash. We had tried all kinds of things to get useful information on my machine when a crash occurred. We added a divide by zero in the code and could not find a way to get what we wanted. We looked at the system event log, VSE settings to allow debug symbols, basically nothing worked. Finally we found a setting in VSE File menu to saw the output as a debug dump file. My Windows laptop for some odd reason fails to read a USB thumb drive sometimes, so I had to reboot the machine and then it worked. I copied the 215mb dump file on the drive and gave it to him and he loaded it on his Mac pretending to be a Windows 8.1 machine. He has all of the Microsoft tools on his machine so was able to find out where the problem is, so I left Starbucks as I had to pick up my son at 7pm, but I knew he would find the problem for me.
From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 23
Here we are at probably the last full day of work on the Windows Store app. It is not really sad for me as I really need a break as I have been putting in way too many hours. I look forward to scaling down the number of hours per day and relaxing over the Christmas break with the family. I am starting off the day listening to Good Old War on Spotify as I need some enjoyable music to start the day off right. I really like their song "Amazing Eyes".
I added the nightly mapping engine build to my app and double checked a couple of things and then checked the DLLs into GitHub. I added some debug statements to verify I am getting all of the correct callbacks for the filtering as that is my final missing piece of functionality. If I can get that working today then I will be a happy camper. I expect that to happen as I know what needs to be done. Since my wife is still sick I have to take my son to a doctor appointment and I may meet the mapping engine lead developer in the afternoon so I need to watch my time closely to make sure I don't run out of time as I definitely do not need another super long work day.
My first attempt worked so I am feeling good about today. I am going to update the status messages first so I can see the affects of the filtering without doing actually doing the filtering. Once I understand that part, then I should be done as the rest is easy. I was really tempted to rename so properties in the event being passed to me but then I decided against it and just use it as is. A side note about refactoring code before I go crazy and finish my last task. When working on Adobe Flex for several years, I complained about how refactoring is more than just renaming something. Now VSE has done the same thing to me all over again. Except they added the ability to extract a method also. Apple Xcode is not much better so I cannot brag about them either. I just find it pretty sad that many ages ago when I worked in Java that the Eclipse IDE had all refactoring support and yet I have to see another IDE that had that capability since then. I have use that a couple of times in I am over that and moving on...
I must say that Good Old War was a perfect band choice for today.
It never fails, when the heat is on something horrible happens. For me today the app just stopped working and all day long I have been trying to figure out why. I am still struggling with how that happened. No words to describe how long today was.
I added the nightly mapping engine build to my app and double checked a couple of things and then checked the DLLs into GitHub. I added some debug statements to verify I am getting all of the correct callbacks for the filtering as that is my final missing piece of functionality. If I can get that working today then I will be a happy camper. I expect that to happen as I know what needs to be done. Since my wife is still sick I have to take my son to a doctor appointment and I may meet the mapping engine lead developer in the afternoon so I need to watch my time closely to make sure I don't run out of time as I definitely do not need another super long work day.
My first attempt worked so I am feeling good about today. I am going to update the status messages first so I can see the affects of the filtering without doing actually doing the filtering. Once I understand that part, then I should be done as the rest is easy. I was really tempted to rename so properties in the event being passed to me but then I decided against it and just use it as is. A side note about refactoring code before I go crazy and finish my last task. When working on Adobe Flex for several years, I complained about how refactoring is more than just renaming something. Now VSE has done the same thing to me all over again. Except they added the ability to extract a method also. Apple Xcode is not much better so I cannot brag about them either. I just find it pretty sad that many ages ago when I worked in Java that the Eclipse IDE had all refactoring support and yet I have to see another IDE that had that capability since then. I have use that a couple of times in I am over that and moving on...
I must say that Good Old War was a perfect band choice for today.
It never fails, when the heat is on something horrible happens. For me today the app just stopped working and all day long I have been trying to figure out why. I am still struggling with how that happened. No words to describe how long today was.
Monday, December 16, 2013
From concept to reality in 6 weeks - part 22
We have to pick up every a couple of notches today. To start off the day on the wrong foot, my Windows laptop had updates that had to be applied which meant a reboot. The only good thing about that is that it forces me to reboot my Windows laptop which I forget to do after using a Mac for so many years you just forget about it like one should. Why would I ever want to reboot my computer daily or weekly?
On the other hand my wife is sick and is got worse over the weekend, which almost never happens. I keep telling myself that I cannot sick as I now have to finish the rest of the work in two days. I will leave one extra day to change anything the customer wants changing. The good news is that I never expected to have any break over Christmas so now I get one! I definitely need a break to recover as this has been fun but I cannot sustain this for much longer without downtime.
Now to work. I have a new update to the mapping engine this morning that I need to try. I downloaded the ZIP file and updated all of the files in my project. I cleaned the solution and then did a rebuild solution. I then ran the app to make sure everything was still working as it should. The first problem of the day, which I knew there would some issues when I try to hurry up. The server failed with a 500 error. I knew that I was going to run into road blocks today and tomorrow as I try to rush to the finish line.
When I rewrote all of the asynchronous server downloading code yesterday I forgot to put in the debug statements for the URLs being accessed so that would have helped the above 500 error. I need to put those back in and then try again. I also need to add back in the Cancel button on the progress as after the 500 error, the app got stuck. I could actually take care of that case as well. First the debug statements to figure out the real problem and then I will look into handling errors and the cancel button. After I add the log statements, now I no longer see the 500 server error. I don't know how to feel about that. A bug you cannot reproduce is not giving me a warm fuzzy feeling this early in the morning or any time of the day for that matter. I am going to work on the Cancel button to get that to work as a fall back, just in case it happens again. I am going to the number of dat ago download to 24, so it will be easy to tell if the cancel actually works. I then will check to make sure I can start another download as it has to clear everything on the map and start over. Cancel and restarting download from scratch is working - now that is a good start to the day as all of the that finished in only one hour. One thing is absolutely for sure and that as I rewrite code it is definitely getting better with each passing day. Time to check in the code and move on. Wait, I am going to the save the JSON files for 24 hours as a backup in case I do not have an internet connection so I can still do work.
The next big task is finishing the user interface for the download dialog where the user can choose how much data to download from the server to the app. Now that I know all of the underlying code works and is testing, adding the UI and doing something when the user clicks on the Download button will be so easy. At least that is what I am thinking right now anyway!
Every time I use a Grid layout I have to remember the difference between "Auto" and "*". It makes sense when you learn it but it just is not intuitively obvious to me as it just does not fit my mental modal. There must have been some special keyword Microsoft could have created to mean auto-fill all remaining space instead of using a "*". Now what I am over that, I must learn how to use a slider and configure it like I want it to look. First I read up on the standard guidelines for sliders as I don't want to create something that looks and works really oddly on Windows. I take that back first thing is to find the right music for my mood. I have been listening to Jazz this morning but it is just not doing it for me. I switch over to Spotify and try to discover something new from it's suggestions since I have been listening to Spotify for so long. OK, I am switching to blues as that is just about right.
Yet another very long, so I need to recap what I did since my last comment and what I learned. I first tried to use the Perpetuum free controls as I wanted to see if their calendar and date/time controls were good. The bottom line is not what I wanted at all, so I remove the DLLs from the project and removed all references. No need code that does not help me, so it is all gone. Next I looked up how to use the standard Windows Store Metro sliders as I need to show minimum and maximum values, which I had to do myself using a TextBlock, Slider and TextBlock inside horizontal StackPanel. Pretty easy to add tick marks as the Slider just did the right thing by adding minimum and maximum values. That was easy as it should be. I looked up the standard guidelines on using sliders just to make sure I was not doing anything off guidelines.
Then I wanted to learn more about customizing components using styles and templates so I read yet another MSDN web page on that topic. What I have yet to figure out was how to see the existing visual templates in VDE. I found references to it but I just got too impatient trying to find it in VSE. I did find this great explanation on how to create Metro styles. I wish I had more time to explore that in great detail but I am in a hurry today.
Since I got rid of Perpetuum, I need to get up to speed on how to use the Telerik Date/Time component and they have really great documentation so it made my life very easy. Specifically I just skip to the Selector properties as everything just made sense with little documentation reading. It took me a couple of hours to get the dialog looking special like I wanted it to, but the end result made me happy and worth the effort involved.
I spent several hours working with the mapping engine lead developer to make sure I understood all of the issues and a couple of them were indeed misunderstandings on my part where I had to fix my code. By the end of the very long day, I am good on all of the issues and will met him tomorrow to finish off the rest.
To end the day I had to look up the latitude/longitude extents of the continental USA and also including Alaska. With these bounds I can tell the mapping engine how to show that part of the geographic map initially. I found a couple of interesting blog posts on this subject. The most useful one was a link to OpenStreetMaps with the extents showing on a map so I could verify I had them set right. I double checked them on another blog post. I was using the geographic center of the USA of (39.8282, -98.5795) and trying to change the zoom level but that was too odd. Now I am using visible extents of (24.52, -124.77) to (49.38, 66.95) and that did the trick.
To end the data I re-wrote code to read 24 hours of data from local disk as a debugging aid so I did not have to wait for the server to return the data. At least this verified that the problem is not in my code as 44,000 observations were loaded into the mapping engine very quickly. If I have time tomorrow I will have to look into that some more to find where all of the time is spent as maybe I am doing something wrong in gathering the data from the server.
Right now I am very tired and need to call it another day. Tomorrow will be the last full day of development unless the customer coughs up more money for me to do more work. I am feeling the need for rest...
On the other hand my wife is sick and is got worse over the weekend, which almost never happens. I keep telling myself that I cannot sick as I now have to finish the rest of the work in two days. I will leave one extra day to change anything the customer wants changing. The good news is that I never expected to have any break over Christmas so now I get one! I definitely need a break to recover as this has been fun but I cannot sustain this for much longer without downtime.
Now to work. I have a new update to the mapping engine this morning that I need to try. I downloaded the ZIP file and updated all of the files in my project. I cleaned the solution and then did a rebuild solution. I then ran the app to make sure everything was still working as it should. The first problem of the day, which I knew there would some issues when I try to hurry up. The server failed with a 500 error. I knew that I was going to run into road blocks today and tomorrow as I try to rush to the finish line.
When I rewrote all of the asynchronous server downloading code yesterday I forgot to put in the debug statements for the URLs being accessed so that would have helped the above 500 error. I need to put those back in and then try again. I also need to add back in the Cancel button on the progress as after the 500 error, the app got stuck. I could actually take care of that case as well. First the debug statements to figure out the real problem and then I will look into handling errors and the cancel button. After I add the log statements, now I no longer see the 500 server error. I don't know how to feel about that. A bug you cannot reproduce is not giving me a warm fuzzy feeling this early in the morning or any time of the day for that matter. I am going to work on the Cancel button to get that to work as a fall back, just in case it happens again. I am going to the number of dat ago download to 24, so it will be easy to tell if the cancel actually works. I then will check to make sure I can start another download as it has to clear everything on the map and start over. Cancel and restarting download from scratch is working - now that is a good start to the day as all of the that finished in only one hour. One thing is absolutely for sure and that as I rewrite code it is definitely getting better with each passing day. Time to check in the code and move on. Wait, I am going to the save the JSON files for 24 hours as a backup in case I do not have an internet connection so I can still do work.
The next big task is finishing the user interface for the download dialog where the user can choose how much data to download from the server to the app. Now that I know all of the underlying code works and is testing, adding the UI and doing something when the user clicks on the Download button will be so easy. At least that is what I am thinking right now anyway!
Every time I use a Grid layout I have to remember the difference between "Auto" and "*". It makes sense when you learn it but it just is not intuitively obvious to me as it just does not fit my mental modal. There must have been some special keyword Microsoft could have created to mean auto-fill all remaining space instead of using a "*". Now what I am over that, I must learn how to use a slider and configure it like I want it to look. First I read up on the standard guidelines for sliders as I don't want to create something that looks and works really oddly on Windows. I take that back first thing is to find the right music for my mood. I have been listening to Jazz this morning but it is just not doing it for me. I switch over to Spotify and try to discover something new from it's suggestions since I have been listening to Spotify for so long. OK, I am switching to blues as that is just about right.
Yet another very long, so I need to recap what I did since my last comment and what I learned. I first tried to use the Perpetuum free controls as I wanted to see if their calendar and date/time controls were good. The bottom line is not what I wanted at all, so I remove the DLLs from the project and removed all references. No need code that does not help me, so it is all gone. Next I looked up how to use the standard Windows Store Metro sliders as I need to show minimum and maximum values, which I had to do myself using a TextBlock, Slider and TextBlock inside horizontal StackPanel. Pretty easy to add tick marks as the Slider just did the right thing by adding minimum and maximum values. That was easy as it should be. I looked up the standard guidelines on using sliders just to make sure I was not doing anything off guidelines.
Then I wanted to learn more about customizing components using styles and templates so I read yet another MSDN web page on that topic. What I have yet to figure out was how to see the existing visual templates in VDE. I found references to it but I just got too impatient trying to find it in VSE. I did find this great explanation on how to create Metro styles. I wish I had more time to explore that in great detail but I am in a hurry today.
Since I got rid of Perpetuum, I need to get up to speed on how to use the Telerik Date/Time component and they have really great documentation so it made my life very easy. Specifically I just skip to the Selector properties as everything just made sense with little documentation reading. It took me a couple of hours to get the dialog looking special like I wanted it to, but the end result made me happy and worth the effort involved.
I spent several hours working with the mapping engine lead developer to make sure I understood all of the issues and a couple of them were indeed misunderstandings on my part where I had to fix my code. By the end of the very long day, I am good on all of the issues and will met him tomorrow to finish off the rest.
To end the day I had to look up the latitude/longitude extents of the continental USA and also including Alaska. With these bounds I can tell the mapping engine how to show that part of the geographic map initially. I found a couple of interesting blog posts on this subject. The most useful one was a link to OpenStreetMaps with the extents showing on a map so I could verify I had them set right. I double checked them on another blog post. I was using the geographic center of the USA of (39.8282, -98.5795) and trying to change the zoom level but that was too odd. Now I am using visible extents of (24.52, -124.77) to (49.38, 66.95) and that did the trick.
To end the data I re-wrote code to read 24 hours of data from local disk as a debugging aid so I did not have to wait for the server to return the data. At least this verified that the problem is not in my code as 44,000 observations were loaded into the mapping engine very quickly. If I have time tomorrow I will have to look into that some more to find where all of the time is spent as maybe I am doing something wrong in gathering the data from the server.
Right now I am very tired and need to call it another day. Tomorrow will be the last full day of development unless the customer coughs up more money for me to do more work. I am feeling the need for rest...
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)