Thursday, May 27, 2004
Fun With Someone Else’s Code
Sigh…
I have this program that was primarily written and masterminded by a former partner. It’s mostly done, and very nice to the extent that it is done. The primary functionality is there and solid enough for it to be beta, which is exactly what I am attempting to make happen in the next week.
I’m finally enough less busy to put in some time trying to make a distribution that will work. Sounds easy enough, eh? I had left the testbed server and a virgin Windows 2000 machine with my partner so he could work on this, but immediately after he went and got laser eye surgery and couldn’t spend much time staring at computers for a few weeks. Now it’s back with me.
Long story shorter, in the design environment it runs fine. When the four projects that comprise the program are compiled, bringing up the form containing the homebrew custom control (usercontrol) gives an error that there is no license to use the control in the development environment. It’s not the development environment, and the control is set not to require licensing. Duh. The error is completely bogus. Which makes me wonder if it’s a sign of broken binary compatibility or something, which I used to know more about.
In the course of playing with that this afternoon, I discovered something that appeared to be a configuration program my former partner had made and included in at least one of the source code directory trees. Curious, I ran it.
It deleted the SQL Server database the program was using. No prompting. Just gone. Doh!
I feel like I keep going backward.
At least I can rebuild the database structure using a .sql file, which is how we originally created it. It’s just work I did not anticipate.
This is the kind of thing I’d end up solving in one crazy weekend in which I’d barely leave the office and have my most focused times in the wee hours.
It’s to the point where I have started considering hiring someone to bang on it for a couple days. When I work on it, I am applying time I can’t explicitly bill for to a project that will eventually bring in modest definite money, and might potentially get other customers as well. If I have an unemployed programmer friend work on it, I can do enough billable work while they are working on it to be able to pay them and still net something definite. That’s the thing about hiring. It’s not necessarily just a cost; it’s leverage.
Anyway, I think I am going to leave well enough alone and head home to the wife and almost-kid for the night. Before I do any more damage.