I get an email every friday about the new events for families on the weekend on www.neighborhood-kids.com. The design is great. I love it, but my eyes and mind do skip over things in the page just assuming they are pretty but useless. Then I noticed the clock at the top of the page was right about the time. Wow, that is cool. I'm going to have to pay closer attention to what is technically happening on web sites.

Living in the northwest is wonderful but when spring and summer start to show up (meaning the sun makes a regular appearance), I totally loose all motivation. My brother from England worked a summer for Boeing in Seattle a few years ago. He was shocked that people didn't do any work in the summer. I was always luck at Microsoft to not have a summer ship date. That would have totally sucked.

How can I think about writing code and the project when the sun is out just laughing at me, taunting me to come out.

There are a few times in my life when a project phase just goes on forever. Back in my Microsoft days, I hated the last stages of the ship cycle. People were burned out, higher-ups were already on to the next phase. Front-line devs, testers, pms, and writers were either too burned out to function or too hyped up to listen. The mid-level guys were running interference every which way. The bell-curve was watched and the marketing dicks were breathing down everyone's throat and lord help you if you broke the build. I was thrilled when my boss finally made the rounds to ask if I thought the product was ready to ship. He asked everyone personally instead of some meeting where the team bully could badger me into saying something I would regret.

And here I am with my own project in the end of one of the first phases and I trudge on. I'm not near enough done. No ship award in my near future.

I'm moving some duplicate code from a codebehind file to a class file so I can reuse it. I'm tired and it's a bit late for my best programming so I'm trying to remember is the c# return type also null now. Or maybe no return type needs to be specified if a variable isn't returned (is that vb?). If null works in SQL and it works an an object value to compare against in c#, why can't null be a valid return type instead of void. What does void really say under the covers that is so different from null. Isn't void a carryover from c and c++. Perhaps it's older than that. Why do I need to remember yet another keyword that has no value. No, that's not a pun. I have too many numbers and words in my head that have to be pulled out at a moment's notice. Why add one more? Get rid of void. Just rip it right out.

I'm still cleaning up code. One of the things that has never worked in NetTiers is the Microsoft Enterprise Library Exception Handling. I would get an exception thrown in the NetTiers code and the line was an exception with no data. I would get the error on a SQL insert via the NetTiers layers but no information about what was wrong with the data. Since I'm using the Insert where the param is the base type such as

   userService.Insert(newUser);

I knew that datatyping from a C#/.Net perspective wasn't the problem. I knew it was at a SQL level but I didn't know what it could be. So I finally had to fix the .NetTiers ExceptionHandling. I'm not sure why doesn't work right off the bat like the rest of NetTiers but I also didn't care enough to investigate. Once I get the ExceptionHandling working, I don't ever touch so I haven't had to REALLY understand it.

But now it has to work, it's hard to move forward without inserting data on this particular table. I knew I didn't have anything in web.config for this so that's where I started. I opened the ExceptionHandling Basic Quickstart and looked at the app.config. There were two different sections I added and then the true SQL error was displayed. While this isn't the entire work I'll have to do with Exception Handling on my pet project, at least I can keep going.

The SQL problem turned out to be that a datetime value was not being passed for a column where NULL was not allowed. Once the error handling showed the problem of datetime out of range, and I looked at the column definitions, I realized the problem.

Here are the sections I added to web.config:

1) in the <configSections>

<section name="exceptionHandling" type="Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling.Configuration.ExceptionHandlingSettings, Microsoft.Practices.EnterpriseLibrary.ExceptionHandling" />

2) the last entry before the end <Configuration> tag:

Now that I have 90% of the v1 features for my pet project web site decided, and have a bullet-proof process for new tables, custom procs and other stuff NetTiers handles, I'm cleaning up the code. I'm ripping out any code I wrote to go against the SQL server that NetTiers handles for me. I'm cleaning up all gridview and codebehind to be consistent with naming and usage. I'm removing files that were tests to see how I wanted something to work. I'm removing links and cleaning up the masters.

Wayne suggested I change a feature from random choice to numeric order choice so that a progression was predectible. I've been fighting it but he finally gave me a business logic reason. Ok, so now I'm changing SQL table column data types. That dominos into all sorts of changes.

Once all this gets back to working, I'll start on the visual design. I haven't written themes and skins so I'm going to try to grab a working set that is close to my overall design. I'll implement it then dink with it till I get the look I can live with short term. Them I'll hand off the theme/skin to a graphic web designer. I don't mind paying for this because I definitely see the value.

Do you have a graphic designer you like?

Wayne and I are remodeling our kitchen. In the process, we are shopping for cabinets. We want quality cabinets in the look that goes with our craftsman home. The high-end price is twice as much as the next quote down in dollar value. While we aren't comparing apples to apples, we are trying to. I keep comparing our kitchen remodel and new-construction backporch to a web site. I know nothing about cabinets and most web site clients know nothing about quality web sites. One of the cabinet salesman said the cabinets were guaranteed for life. No software manufacturer would ever say that. Some pointed questions reveled that only certain things were guaranteed.

What should a non-technical client expect from your final product? They won't ask all the questions you know they should. So lets work on some quality questions:

1) What error detection, communication, and recovery is provided? No one expects it to break so they won't ask this unless they have been burned by this.

2) What, if any, part of the code do they own and can literally walk away with? Are you letting them use your code base you already developed for a fee with a few new custumizations or is this new work written 100% by the web company? Same question for any graphics, images, code libraries, web services, etc?

3) What availability and time frame will you provide for fixes? Is this a scaled situation where only mission-critical bugs are given 24/7 coverage? Or are you tossing the web site over the fence and walking away?

4) What testing will be provided? Who does it and how do they determine the web site is of a certain quality bar? How is the quality managed internally? How is it communicated externally back to the client?

We all want to think we have a certain standard for code quality but how do we communcate that? How do we stand behind it? How do we demonstrate our code meets our own standards? You can song and dance your way around this so the client buys any thing you say but at the end of the day you still know if you meet your own standards. But how?

My pet project is a new website. I'm working on the search page which searches through several NetTiers Services in the Component layer. It took me a few hours to figure out exactly what I wanted to do here. Do I user an Object Data Source? User StringBuilder to return an HTML table? What should the gridview link to once the search has been performed?

Then I thought, I know I'm just going to AJAX this code. Am I just wasting my time? I just want to get v1 out the door. AJAX can wait to v2 but then I think none of this code would be used via AJAX except the NetTiers stuff.

Do you design new websites via AJAX right off the bat? I haven't done enough AJAX to be able to think AJAX as a first pass on the design.

If you have a full-time job programming, you might do something else in your spare time. However, I don't have that situation. I get my fill from 7pm to 10pm at night due to my current situation. I left a non-programming meeting last night and rushed home to start up VS and keep going on my project. I was thrilled to still have a couple of hours left before I had to stop. Then hubby starts watching HULU.com. Arghh! We sit next to each other in our office so this was not as conducive to programming as say...a jackhammer might be. Tonight I'm in the other room while he hulu's on.