Changing Requirements, Photos, and Chats

Well, I came in expecting to work on the file-transfer code. Maaaybe tomorrow.

First, I receeved an email from Melinda letting me know that a number of data entry fields were missing from my targeted specification. I verified this (I didn't realize the tool I had been using as a reference changed under certain situations), recompiled the changes, and sent the review back out. Exactly the kind of input I was hoping to get... some sections of the of the new tool looked mighty sparse.

When going over the new areas of that other tool, I discovered a previously undocumented requirement that each file that is added must have a platform assigned to it (x86, ia64, amd64, Common). I ended up talking with Karin for about an hour about how these interact (sometimes the choice of platform impacts the path that the file is allowed to come from, and other unique traits). Marc came in 1/3 of the way in, and my manager came in towards the end to participate. At that point, the meeting was quickly wrapped up; we'll be doing another Windows Workflow object to handle path cleanup, rather than handling it on client-side input.

I brought back lunch, sat down at my desk and found that I was late to the team meeting. Marc and Yingzi were the only other devs there... I learned that Yingzi is an XML & WinZip expert (two fields that I'll be working in shortly)... good to know there's someone to bounce ideas off of. Everyone assured everyone else that they were making good progress, and the rest of the meeting was spent discussing an Active Directory problem that recently came up on Marc's server after a reboot this morning.

In the intervening moments, I've pretty much finished hooking up the platform checkboxes. I also had the chance to fire up Scripting.FileSystemObject, and at least verify that the files exist where the user is claiming they exist. Next, I'll end up copying them over to a write-only public share on the server for later processing (I don't want to be sending them through POSTs). I am a bit worried about the security implications of using this object... the users have to give our site some pretty hefty authority for it to even load, and they're prompted whenever it's created.

Photos
I've mentioned before how much I love photography. Well, I just got word from Hari S. of a competition being hosted by Windows Vista-- employees can submit up to three desktops for possible inclusion for installed desktops, or the All Users picture directory. It closes tomorrow... I'm going to have to run home and look for some of my best. It'd be great to have that kind of exposure (pun intended :).

Chats
Our group was invited to participate in an interactive Chat session with the Windows Vista/Longhorn techbeta to talk about the SDK. At first, there were about 8 of us, and only two participants. It took the moderator a while to realize that he invited us to log on at 2:00... and the customers were told to show up at 3:00. At least it wasn't the other way around! By the time the chat wrapped up, there were probably 50 participants. I had it running in the background (not having worked yet on the cool new SDK-type stuff), but I saw a few comments from participants that showed it went really well. It feels good to be on a team that is interactively participating with the customers.

The best commentary was between LGS & Karl, between 2:00 and 3:00. Only four of us had stayed logged on, and participants were just starting to filtering in...

LGS: How many different technologies do you suppose are included in the sdk? Gotta be at least a hundred. Probably more. And it looks like only 4 brave souls to face all that?
Karl [Blackice]: I know, I feel sorry for the whole vista team.