Thursday, 31 January 2008

Month Review - January


January's been a challenging month! I started working full time on my software at the start of the year, so here's look back at the month:


Achievements

I've got quite a bit done, but a lot of it has been "under the hood" stuff which isn't that visible. I've been tidying up some fundamental things that I'd left earlier in the project - things are a lot better now, but it's quite frustrating to not be able to see any dramatic change!! I'm happy with what I've got done, but I'm not quite as far on as I hoped I'd be.


Lessons

I've learned that it's important to have a life! I cleared all of my spare time at the start of this project, cancelling commitments and activities, in order to focus on what I'm doing. This has given me more space, which was great, but I've been struggling to switch off from the work, which is bad! I've been amazed at how much this kind of thing has affected me. The solution so far is to make time for some evening stuff to try and balance me out a bit. (...well, as balanced as it's possible for me to be...!)


Looking forward to...

Getting married!! The wedding plans are coming along slowly, and Laura and I are very much looking forward to having a break on honeymoon! I'm also looking forward to getting the software sounding better - there's some tweaks I need to make, but once it's sounding good, it'll feel like I'm getting somewhere!!


Roll on February...

Thursday, 17 January 2008

Expression Blend and Visual Studio 2008


Expression Blend seems to have been coded to work with Visual Studio 2005, so after installing Visual Studio 2008 some stuff went a bit crankey for me.


After a quick search, I found a "Configurator" tool, which looks like it was a hack put out there whilst VS2008 was still called "Orcas" during beta testing...


I was just about to download it when I found there's a Service Pack 1 for Expression Blend that should fix all of the problems - http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?familyid=a07196d1-971b-4710-99c8-d3d9603ccfcb&displaylang=en. Good stuff - hopefully it'll fix some of the other weird things that Expression does - I like it as a tool but, as with any new product, there are a few things that don't seem to be 100% right!