Sampy's Blog : Day in the Life

Ugh

misampso — Fri, 08 Apr 2005 05:07:00 GMT

Work is pretty slow going now a days. I'm slogging through a lot of bugs and it's just plain tiring.

Oh well, I still have World of Warcraft waiting for me at home :)

Week 2 so far

misampso — Wed, 23 Mar 2005 18:15:00 GMT

I've got 6 fixes sitting on my machine now and I'm going to try and fix 2 or 3 more before I start another checkin this afternoon.

I haven't been working too late this week other than a late night on Monday. The team is bringing in dinners this week for people who want to stay late but I probably won't take advantage of that again. This week is spring break for my wife (she's a grad student) so I'd like to spend some time with her. But I have my smart card so I can always connect to work from home and get some stuff done at night.

Will post again with the bugs I'm checking in this afternoon. If you'd like to hear more about a certain bug, let me know and I'll tell you about the issue and the fix.

Day 4 and 5 - Back to fixing

misampso — Fri, 18 Mar 2005 23:09:00 GMT

Sorry I missed you guys yesterday, we had a St. Patty's day party in the afternoon (my usual blog time).

I spent most of yesterday and today just fixing away at some bugs. I only have 2 right now that are marked as fixed available (I've got the code but I haven't checked in yet):

ClickOnce Automation: BootstrapperEnabled property throws a COMException when accessed
Cannot Undo/Redo dialogs on Publish Page

Did you guys know that the project designer supported Undo/Redo? Most people don't. Check it out (but not the security page, the fix to get it working with the undo redo engine won't make Beta 2).

My brain is pretty fried on code right now so I think I'll work a little on some test driven development stuff until my head clears.

Day 3 - Checking in

misampso — Wed, 16 Mar 2005 19:16:00 GMT

I'm going to have to cut out a little early today (early being 5:45) so I'm going to focus on getting my bugs checked in today rather than fixing new ones. In order to get ready for Gauntlet, I first have to get a code review from another dev on my team. Once that's done I submit to Gauntlet and wait. Hopefully that won't take all afternoon (the code review, I don't have to wait on Gauntlet) and I can get a few bugs in today.

Day 2 - Product Usage Scenarios

misampso — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 17:45:00 GMT

So today, I won't be fixing a lot of bugs but rather, I'll be putting on my QA (Quality Assurance, our testing unit) hat for a while.

QA is focused on Beta 2 right now so they're not paying much attention to what's going on in our RTM branch. When dev goes off bug fixes for 2 months with no QA safety net, bad things happen. To stave off the decrease in product stability that untested coding always results in, we're doing a few things:

Running QA test automation - we run it against the daily builds from our private branch to ensure we don't break anything.
Run QA Product Usage Scenarios (PUS) - A PUS is basically a demo of the feature and how in interacts with other parts of the product. Since I work on ClickOnce in VS, my scenarios involve making an app that does something interesting (uses the ClickOnce APIs to download files on demand, access a local SQLExpress server, etc.) and then publishing it and installing it. All in all, these take about 4 hours.

So today, I'm running theses scenarios. I was supposed to run them last week as well but I was out sick that day and since then we've re-scheduled when we run them so I get another crack at it :)

New Day in the Life category

misampso — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 01:53:00 GMT

I added a new category for the posts that I started today. If you're interested in following what I've doing during this bug fix push, subscribe to the feed :)

Dark - Day 1

misampso — Tue, 15 Mar 2005 01:50:00 GMT

Fixed 3 bugs today, not bad. I spent most of the afternoon banging my head up against a build problem having to do with my Win Forms designer created resx files. If I can't get it going in the next hour or so, I'll probably just work with my team tomorrow to get it fixed.

Today's Bugs:
Publish Property pages should be disabled when the output type is changed to a non-publishable type (like class library)
FxCop Violation: The ResolveKeySource MSBuild task is too complicated
Signing Property Page UI clean up (the divider lines look wrong)

Do you like this sort of day by day, blow by blow account of my day? You find it interesting? Let me know!

Gauntlet - Measuring success one checkin at a time

misampso — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 18:23:00 GMT

On the VB team, we don't checkin to our source control system (Source Depot or sd) ourselves like mere mortals, we use the automated checkin system called Gauntlet. Gauntlet runs as an .hta app that collects your unsubmitted changelist, asks for some information for the checkin email it will send if things go well, and the bugs it should close in our issue tracker (Product Studio or PS). You run the app from inside our build environment so it has all the right environment variables and stuff it needs to collect you change. After it gets all this data, it uploads it as XML to a server where you wait in the queue.

Once your job gets picked up, it is passed to a build machine which builds your fix and outputs it to a known path on that machine. The controller machine then picks up those changes and puts them on a public share and instructs the test machines to begin. These machines pick up your private fixes and run a pre-defined set of tests you picked when you submitted the job to Gauntlet (you pick what sub-team you work on and it runs all of those tests). If the tests pass, your code is checked into the depot, the bugs are resolved, and the checkin mail goes out (woohoo!). If the tests fail, you get mail indicating which suites failed, what build flavor (debug or release, checked and retail in our language), and links to the logs output by the tests.

When I got in this morning I got a bunch of suite failure mails for 2 checkins that I started over the weekend. Shortly after I parsed through all of them, I got a mail from our Gauntlet admin letting me know we had some machine issues and that's why all the suites failed. Thankfully, it's easy to re-activate a failed job through Gauntlet's web UI. Unfortunatly, I'll be at the back of a long line :P

Going Dark (almost)

misampso — Mon, 14 Mar 2005 17:52:00 GMT

This week VB dev is "going dark" to fix bugs. This means we shut our doors, turn off Outloook, and get some real work done. We've peeled off Beta 2 and are working hard to drive down RTM bugs. By this point in the paragraph, you're probably thinking that I'm going to excuse myself from blogging for a while.

Wrong.

My blog will remain (an become more frequent) as my sole ray of light in this dark time. I'll write about bugs I'm fixing, other things I'm doing, whatever.

Hopefully, I can create a unique view of MS crunch time. We'll see :)