Finding myself having to reference functions and routines more often nowadays. It may be that I am a little bit out of practice. I do a bit of programming at work for our internal department sites but my days are usually spent playing OS detective or battling spyware. Don’t get me wrong – I still have the programming theory down but having to google how to best implement something that seems simple enough is next to pathetic, right? I honestly do not expect myself to memorize every single function and its parameters nor do I expect to remember the best ways to implement things that I have coded a month ago. This morning I was trying to figure out how to reference the DOM using vbscript since I usually use javascript to do so. I thought it was done the same way but it just was not working as the server was spitting out an error about the document object didn’t exist or some garbage. Needless to say, I ended up tacking in some javascript to do the task instead.

Maybe I’m losing my touch. Maybe I need more practice. Maybe I’m just getting older and forgetting things is natural. Maybe I do have vCJD like the CBC said I may have, and that I am slowly losing my mind (I know, not funny – too disturbing to think about actually). Either way, I may just have to put up a flag outside my cubicle that says, “Sorry but I may suck today.”

Drama continues for the web application that I commonly refer to as the stupid form. I did fix it way back when by forcing an Abandon() when the user submits the form, but nowadays we have been seeing the same problems but with people that go to the form and don’t submit anything. I just knew once that I got around to it, I’d figure something out. Well, I’m hoping this will work.

Since the content of the request was intact per user and only the user itself got mixed up when it created the ticket, I just resigned to not storing the user’s ID in the session with the rest of the information. Instead, the form now creates a cookie. That way, there really is no way for it to be mixed up with someone else’s ID since it’s only on the client. I am hoping this will cure, at least, that particular ill. If not, well… let’s not think about it.

Visual Studio .Net, oh I hate you. Let me count the ways… Seriously, though. It is pretty obvious that Visual Studio .Net was designed for designing Windows applications first and web applications were a definite afterthought. To be fair, the VS.Net IDE would be good enough for developing native applications. For web-based projects, I just do not see how anyone can stand it. I tried. Oh my goodness, I have tried. However, even when developing a web application, VS.Net uses absolute positioning for laying out everything. It is still very reminiscent of Visual Basic 5 for goodness sakes. A glance at the “HTML” source revealed a plethora of non-semantic mark up that would make the W3C drown in tears.

Backstory: I have finally finished the redesign of the web application I inherited when I moved over to the desktop software support team. Lately when anybody came to my cubicle and asked about the Software Request Form, I’d reply with “Yeah, it’s ugly.” The interface was riddled with boxes and boxes, red type, and frankly it was just ugly. To be truthful, the guy who developed it modeled the design after my own for the hardware team, but this took it to another level. The new interface is more clean, aligned, and capitalizes on the adage, “Less is more.”

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