I've been told that my next job is to remove MFC completely from our PDA applications (more then 4 of them). When I said that this will take longer than the week or 2 they thought of, their reaction was a simple "What ?!? Why ?". Since they won't accept a clean rewrite of the applications (which would be the best thing to do in this situation), I'ld have to "rewrite" some of the mechanics used in MFC : Message mapping, function mapping, MFC classes used by the apps, etc. I can use some stuff located in the windowsx.h but it doesn't handle everything we need. I think it will take me at least 4 days per app to do the conversion + 1 day of testing to be sure that it works as expected.
Yesterday one of our clients called me because they had (have) some trouble using our updater with ftp access. It sounded quite strange because the client told me that he got a message which only pops up when a server could not be contacted and updated with the latest files on the PDA. First I thought of a problem with the config file but I did some debugging with it and everything just worked fine on my local ftp server. Having said that "local ftp server" means Windows integrated internet ftp server.
So... let's think of this : To do an update, the updater fetches a config file (reads it) from the server. Immediately after the reading I start to work on the config file to move files around. The only operation done by the client is to write to the server... Hmmm... read ok... write not ok... *scratch head*
I quickly tested it by disabling the write access to the folder for the user I login with to the ftp server. Et voila : I could read from the server but not write to it. So, it's either that or there's a firewall between the PDA and the ftp server which let's through read but not write... gonna phone them in some minutes and tell them that... I keep you updated.
HEY ! Today is friday. Last day of the working week. And as I'm a lucky bastard this week, I'm going to spend some days at the belgian northern sea. Gonna make a 280 km ride through the entire Belgium (yes, my country is really that big !). Coming back on monday evening by train since my wife will stay at the coast with our children for a week. So you won't have any new blogs until monday evening ;)
Everything still looks good with "The Game"(TM). I did a little update on it to include the URLs to the shop for the demo version. Basically this means that I'm through with the game and it can ship without any further work from my side (thanks to data driven development). My publisher was even able to do an english version of the game without needing me. You get the link to the game once it is published... happy buying then ;)
I'm in the right mood to do a "post mortem" for the game. I've to talk about this with my publisher but I think it will be ok for him. So, if you are interested in this, drop me a line.
