Funktastic Programming Adventures in Web Development

Well today has been another fun day at work - I spent most of the morning finishing up another lookup form for our web site. It was basically another implementation of the other lookup I worked on yesterday. And since I already had done most of the work previously, it went very quickly.

Now I have been added a new task to create a whole bunch of content
management areas for the web site. Instead of creating a whole bunch of custom admin interfaces and public viewing modules, I am going to try to integrate everything into one unified system. I will do this be creating generic Content storage in the database where all the properties for the content can be stored in another detail table.

This will be a lot of work, but it will make things easier down the road when we start building other specific content areas for our other clients. It is something that we have done before with other major entities in our database so I know that it works. The one unfortunate drawback is that it places a greater load on the database server … but when in Rome!

Today I was busy finishing up a project that I started about 2 months ago. One of the wonderful things about my job is that I can get 90% done with a project and then be put on one urgent task after another until finally… two months later I am asked to finish up the original project.

Unfortunately, it takes me a few hours just to get up to speed on the
current state of the project and I have to do a whole new round of testing to make sure everything works properly. And to add to this, the state of the development servers is always in a constant state of flux. Luckily, I have learned to document all of my work on my own computer so I can reconstruct what I’ve built before.

It took about twice as long as I wanted to get the project up and running. At least everything is working now. On the positive side - my ASP Nuke project now has an italian language translation so now my project is officially international. I am going to monitor more closely the traffic I receive on this site to see if the popularity increases due to the new features I’ve added.

So today I am toiling away at building an automated message processing tool that will open a POP connection to a Microsoft Exchange mailbox and read all of the e-mails in the account. From these e-mails, I need to parse information that is found in the mail headers for an attached e-mail. Only problem is, the headers for the attached message are changed by Microsoft Exchange when you read the e-mail through a POP account.

So after much thought, we have decided that POP (post office protocol) isn’t going to cut it for this project. Instead, we are going to go with a custom dotNet component that was developed in-house. Despite the fact that I haven’t ever worked with dotNet here at work and would have to learn how to use both regular expressions and the database interface, this seemed like the easiest solution to my boss.

We could have done the same thing by using a free ASP IMAP component
available from the web and developed it in 1/10th the time. So this project that is already 2 weeks overdue is going to press on for another week or so. The funny part is that this is just a temporary fix to hold us until another temporary fix is put in place and finally (who knows when) a final solution is built and put in place.

All of this is necessary because Microsoft Exchange changes all of the Internet Headers that are sent through POP access. I really am starting to believe that Microsoft Exchange totally blows!

Today, I had the ominous task of fixing the team information edit page. This involves modifying a web page that is used for 3 different applications and has numerous configuration and security permissions which modify the way it works depending on who you are and which site you log into. Yeah, it’s not exactly the prettiest code in the world and it took me a good 3 hours just to get it working the way it is supposed to.

We have a real mess of code here that is used for many different purposes. All of our sites we build share the same code, so whenever we make a minor change, it affects all of our clients. This is a good thing as far as maintaining code because we can quickly correct issues that affect all of our clients. It becomes a nightmare when we write “client-specific” code for behavior that is only applied to one client’s site.

The code wouldn’t be so bad if we had used a logical way to encapsulate all of the client-specific logic. But instead, we have a rat’s nest of code with lots of conditional statements that make maintaining this beast anything but easy. In fact, most of our time is just spent fixing bugs. We have so many bugs because everything is a rush job and it wasn’t done right the first time. Even my boss admitted this on more than one occasion and he is just as sick as I am of using “patch-worked” code.

It’s not the way to run a professional business because it makes us look bad. This is probably a major reason why our company hasn’t been as successful as it could be. But don’t tell management that they are doing things wrong - they would rather be wrong than successful.

It just wouldn’t be Friday without a crap-load of projects due to be
launched today and another major project piled on me by my boss. My new project is not too difficult though. I have to create a new configuration tab for our web application and make sure a couple of forms have there input fields disabled. In addition to this I have to change some of the
site navigation.

The weather has been very warm down here. It’s been around 90 degrees where I live for the past few weeks. I guess I should get my air conditioner fixed. I called a repair guy last month (actually, I called him 3 or 4 times for the same appointment) but he didn’t show up on time. I’m looking forward to things cooling off a bit
soon. It should be a little bit cooler this weekend.

It’s nice having three different people managing my time. I have the project manager, boss of IT, and the boss’s assistant all giving me instructions and constantly asking me if their project is done yet. On top of this, our project manager is begging me to get his project done because one of the executives has been hounding him to get it done.

Oh, and here’s the topper - as I was posting this short Blog entry, boss called me to ask when I could start working on the project for the project manager and the executive, and “how long will it take?” and “can you stay late tonight to get it done?” Maybe I should just answer him with a question of my own - “can you pay me my full bonus this year instead of stiffing me like before?” I honestly wonder why I still work here sometimes.

Alright, so I’m waiting for my Visual Studio project to load and I thought it would be a good time to update my blog (yes it does take this long.) Things have been crazy around here this short week and I have a lot to get done. Currently, I am working on some bug fixes and also data migration.

Oh, this is just great .. I loaded my project and now the work that I had done a couple of days ago has disappeared. This is pretty typical of the way things go around here. You never know when your work is just going to disappear because of someone’s careless use of Source Control.

So now I am waiting to reload the entire proeject by getting the latest version from Source Control. I’m hoping that my project still lives and breathes. My project manager has been harping on me 3 to 4 times a day on this project alone. It sure would be nice to get something done and off my back.

Yep, it’s still loading. Maybe I’ll go check the TV Guide or something and see if there is anything good on TV tonight. Oh yeah, I don’t need to check, tonight is the premier of “The Apprentice”. I will definitely be watching that tonight to see the next crop of entrepreneurs are up to. Well, I think my project has finally finished loading, better get back to
work.

Today was a little bit hectic. I guess that’s typical for the first day back after a 3-day weekend. I got two things accomplished today including one e-mail blast and fixing the re-ordering of records in a web form. Not really too much to crow about there. On the positive side, I did get a lot of work done on an automated spam mail processor, so that was pretty good.

One of our clients is having problems sending out e-mail. It’s the
weirdest thing because noone else is having the same problem including our employees who send out quite a bit of e-mails every day. I have tried contacting the RoadRunner support to get some indication of what might be going on. The error message she is seeing: “471 4.5.1 Please try again later”. What kind of error message is that? It gives no clue what the
possible error might be.

My old boss came back today unexpectedly. I think he had a meltdown on his computer at home or something. And he was planning on returning to our office a few times a year from his new home back east. So I guess I shouldn’t be too surprised.

So today I have been relegated to data entry because our clients are too lazy to use the site administration tools that we have setup for them. Course, I can’t put all of the blame on them. If I am guessing correctly, our boss probably didn’t even notify the client that these tools had been made available to them recently.

As is typical for Friday, my boss has a lot of little emergencies for me to work on. I am never lacking for work around here (which is a good thing.) I am definitely looking forward to the three-day weekend. Don’t really have any big plans yet, but one thing I plan to do is to get the new version of ASP Nuke launched (finally!)

I spent some time today unloading my Visual Studio project and then
clearing my cache and reloading it. All in an attempt to get our C-Sharp project to compile locally. Still not quite there, but I feel like I am making progress. I will probably need to start learning everying there is to know about Dot NET. It’s tough to market your job skills when the technologies you are proficient in are nearly 6 years old.

Today is a pretty hectic day. It’s funny when people bring you 5 new
projects to work on at the same time and then act surprised when you don’t get it done in one day. Everytime a boss or project manager walks by me, I always hear… “Is it done yet?”. I am getting directions from 4 different people for 6 different projects. We have 4 generals here and only two soldiers.

The funny part is half the time I have no idea which project they are referring to. Sometimes I just pick one of my favorite projects (such as one which I have made some definiite progress on) and respond “yeah, almost done!”.

One thing my former boss did which was pretty cool was limit each of us to a specific division. But with all of the programmers who have left and with our new boss here - I am left to work on all different projects often at the same time. And my computer here is an old Pentium III - 1GHz which doesn’t allow me to open five different solutions in Visual Source Safe. Oh well, at least my boss
has a 3GHz Pentium IV with hyperthreading so he can send e-mails for new projects to me faster!

Well, it had to happen sooner or later. I submitted a database script to be launched and nuked a large part of the functionality of our web application. Seems I forgot to put a WHERE clause on an update query. While doing so, I nuked a general purpose table that is used for all of the applications on our site effectively taking the site down for about 40 minutes.

This used to happen a lot more often back when most of the
developers had full-time access to the production database. Now, we don’t have any access at all. In fact, there are only two people in my company who have access to the production database. Unfortunately, they don’t always review the scripts we send to them and launch them unconditionally trusting that we have done all of the necessary testing before-hand.

Well I had done the testing but only to make sure that the script ran and seemed to update the fields that I wanted. My mistake was in setting nocount on so I didn’t see how many rows were affected. To compound that mistake: in verifying that the updated occurred properly, I only checked the rows that I knew would be affected without testing the web site or looking at any other data. I guess I should be lucky to still have a job here. Ah well, such is life.