when setup isn't just xcopy

Wednesday WordBlogX and Swing Dancing Update

My sleep schedule now completely out of whack and DJ Tamm (that's Tamm with two m's, baby!) is kicking it on C89.5's Nocturnal Transmissions. If it isn't apparent by now, I listen to music (predominantly techno of some sort) constantly. Music is on in the car or in the headphones when I'm biking to work, on the computer when I'm working, and on at home when I'm just relaxing banging on the blogs. Music cuts out all the random noises and helps me focus on the task at hand.

Anyway, I was talking going to talk about WordBlogX. As mentioned before I've been focused on getting a real setup program created for WordBlogX. Well, I got stalled on that work when I found out you have to tweak a couple custom properties in the actual Word template. I started out trying to get a managed code wrapper for structured storage files since Word documents and templates are structured storage files. This has been a pain thus very slow going. Tonight, on the way back from Capitol Hill I realized there was absolutely no reason to try to write managed code to update the Word tempate when I could just use "boring old" C++. I think writing all this managed code at work has warped my brain and not all of it in a good way. <sigh/>

It should only take a few hours to write and test the deferred CustomAction to update the WordBlogX template in C++. When I get it done, maybe I'll take the time to dissect the code up here in a blog. Writing deferred CustomActions well is kinda' tricky but I have written so many in the last couple years that I have a very solid pattern I follow. I'll share that pattern in the future.

So the upshot of all this is that the new WordBlogX setup might get done this Sunday. Saturday night is out since the ShowMe crew (of which I'm a proud member) is going to Kells to see Amadan play and shoot some car bombs. After the WordBlogX setup is done I'll get the WordML stuff in and post the sucker back to http://www.gotdotnet.com.

This was also the last night of swing dance lessons. I stuck around after the lesson and danced for about 3 hours solid. My feet hurt now but it was a great time. I'm thinking I'm going to have to sign up for East Coast Swing 2 lessons that start in a couple weeks.