Thursday, November 24, 2011

Wed 23rd Nov

So I’ve spent half the day adding a game date to the bloody scoresheet. Date handling in JavaScript / JSON and MVC is a right pain in the arse. Throw in jQueryUI date pickers and knockout, and it’s just a complete clusterfuck.

Ended up being a fairly productive day, though worked until early hours of the morning. Grid system is shaping up nicely!

Tuesday, November 22, 2011

Tue 22nd November

Getting there! Got basic game statistics up and running. Still a lot of work to do, definitely a lot of cleaning up to do, but it’s starting to look like an application!

Fri 18th Nov

I guess not a lot happened last Friday…

Thursday, November 17, 2011

Thu 17th Nov

Didn’t get much done today, was a fairly late, productive night last night. I have the wall of tasks set up, should work fairly well, all those sticky notes staring down at me, jostling with each other to be noticed. Well… At least I can move them around and tell them which ones need to be done before the next big release. Err… First big release. Uhh… First alpha release… Whatever, release.

Basic stats tomorrow, then very near to a release candidate anyways. Apart from all those little yellow sticky notes staring down at me.

Wednesday, November 16, 2011

Wed 16th Nov

A couple of responses on the stackoverflow question. One about the new version of the Azure SDK, released two days ago, apparently contains improved exception contracts. Downloading now, hopefully this is what is needed!

Got a little paranoid last night about backups not working. I know that the maximum file size for Windows Live Mesh is 50Mb, and some of the database backups are bigger than that. A new approach is needed. Got a workspace set up to get the entire source control repository to a backup folder that is synced with Live Mesh. Should work much better, but still got to sort out Windows Live Mesh running as a service properly.

Tue 15th November

Authentication today. This will support persistence of team list. As it is per user, it makes sense now to put this on the user object. This will probably change, particularly when we start to support multiple users for the same “account”.

Man. Table Storage exceptions suck balls. So bloody useful. Azure diagnostics look ridiculous to configure. I guess I’m going to have to at some point, may as well get them going.

So it looks like turning development storage logging on results in a stack more information. Why this doesn’t appear in the exception thrown, or at least have an option to return it, is beyond me. I’ll have to try Fiddler.

Posted on stackoverflow about exception messages. See what comes back.

Tuesday, November 15, 2011

Mon 14th November

Will get the selection panel completed and unit tested today. Looking good!

Pretty much done, except from styling and persisting the team list. Tomorrow!

Monday, November 14, 2011

Fri 11th November

Fairly late one last night. Focus is somewhat lacking today.

Managed to get a good start to player selection working.

Thursday, November 10, 2011

Thu 10th November

Everything was a bit screwy with the network this morning. Seems the domain controller got it’s knickers in a knot. Resetting the administrator password and rebooting it fixed everything. Might be time to get a physical server for it!

It is going to be one of those days. Now the TFS build controller is “unavailable”. Why do things just break without any change? Manually restarted the build controller and all seems well. Looks like the domain controller failing has quite a few flow on effects.

Had some fun getting QUnit tests running and passing on the build server. I intend to write a blog post about this. Turns out I had to install IE9 to get some of the UI tests passing. It’s a bit of a flag to make sure I test on different browser versions! At least the tests are running, passing and reporting correctly now.

Wednesday, November 9, 2011

Wed 9th November

Things are getting there. Working in the stats grids now. Looking good!

Working with some fun oddities in the DataContractJsonSerializer and other things. DateTime values are fun! Manually hacking them out of the generated JSON string for now. Will have to deal with them a bit better down the track.

Visual Studio is starting to display some oddities, mostly ones I’ve seen before, like certain keys not working (navigation, backspace), intellisense not working 100% of the time (Resharper?) and general immediate compilation funkiness.

Monday, November 7, 2011

Thu 3rd November

Another beautiful day in sunny Canberra. Nice.

Most of today will probably be spent setting up vegie garden stuff, but will be doing some research into Azure table storage and starting to get a DAL ready in a spike project. Also need to get Unity working with MVC again.

Thursday, November 3, 2011

Wed 2nd November

It’s been a week. A most enjoyable week spent in Noosa with my girl. The Sunshine Coast is awesome! The trip home was not quite as planned, thanks Qantas, but we made it.

Forgot to blog yesterday. The scoresheet is getting close to being feature complete. Can now add extra balls in the final over, navigation works well, except for one minor issue, but going to ignore that for now haha. I had high hopes for the knockout.mapping plugin, but there is some quite unexpected behaviour in there (i.e. specifying “copy” on an observable array so it maps it into the existing instance as a normal array makes all its children “copies” as well.) The persisted version is a very lightweight version of the view model anyways, so wrote a quick custom implementation. Very simple, very fast, easy to understand, no dependency on an external library, much better!

Just created my Azure account for my BizSpark MSDN subscription. It is just so cool that Microsoft are giving me all of this software for free. They’ll get their money out of me, of course, but it makes life so much easier for now!

So much to learn about Azure for now anyways. Got to try and remember as much as possible from the 2 day Azure course I did earlier in the year, plus Azure Service Bus, etc, etc!

Not sure how much of that will get done today. Going to go to the gym, got to leave at 5, want to set up a seedling propagation tank for a vege garden, set up a new fish tank to move that damn guarami out.

Wednesday, November 2, 2011

Wed 26th October

Morning, LiveWriter! How you doin’ today?

So, some UI tests with QUnit and jQuery this morning. Still haven’t solved the copy and paste issue with providing markup and templates to QUnit, but will just copy and paste for now. These tests should make the port from jquery-tmpl to knockout control flow bindings much easier.

During investigation into using AJAX to load templates, came up against a strange issue with making AJAX calls using the jQuery-1.5.1-vsdoc library – “TypeError: Cannot read property 'context' of undefined”. Works fine with the normal, non-vsdoc version. H-okay!