Main

What?

Why?

Nouns

Old Stuff

Mail

What a weekend. Contrary to the title of the entry, we didn't make it out to see Wild Wild West, but I still think it makes for a fun title.

Braz and his charming wife Kristen were in town over the weekend, and we had a lot of fun. We went to Uno's, which has sort of turned into a tradition for us, apparently. Anyway, that was Saturday night, after which Braz and I lounged around and watched a few old Westerns, followed by judicious viewings of Sportscenter and Baseball Tonight on ESPN. The girls made meringue cookies and the ice cream proto-stuff. They gave Braz and I two plates of cookies, and then wondered out loud why we were so hyper. Ha!

Braz just got a new Powerbook. Was very sweet. I gawked a lot. Q3 looked wonderful. Unreal, which I had never played before, was absolutely gorgeous. Very eerie game, too, especially in the beginning. Instead of most of the 3D whack-a-mole games, where you start out with 100% health and a pistol of sorts, in Unreal you start out with bupkis, and 12% health. The only time I died was because a light fell on me. I kid you not.

And we went to the Cube. Caught up in Braz's purchase-o-ramaing, I splurged a bit as well. I got a Concrete collection (Fragile Creature), the Stormwatch trade (Change or Die), and the Priest's Spell Compendium (getting back into AD&D is a great excuse to buy gaming stuff, right?). For his part, Braz stuck to a theme and got Cerebus and Strangers in Paradise TPBs. Note restraint. ;-)

Okay, the rest of the weekend was fucking wonderful, too. Topic change ahead.

I took a break from writing this to try to install the new version of Microsoft's Developer's Studio (DevStudio) today, since everyone else but me on my project is using it.

I hope whoever wrote it dies a hideously painful, tortured death, replete with flesh-eating bacteria, incontinent baboons, barbed hooks, a record-winning case of nostril cancer, with disco music playing in the background, over and over again, at the wrong speed.

Not only was the installation one of the sloppiest I've seen in a while, but the fact that there are already 2 service packs ("patches") out already should be a telling sign. And one of the service packs crashed while installing. Twice.

But now it's after lunch, and I've gotten it all installed, and I go to recompile my two little things (a DLL and a tester program) and it looks like everything's fine. I go to run the tester program. Boom. Crash. Shit.

I started stepping through the program, to see where the crash is taking place. It takes me a few times to home in on it, because it's happening very early when the application starts up. Then I find it.

When you tell DevStudio that you want to create an application, it pre-generates a sort of skeleton for you, based on a few parameters that you give it. It's moderately helpful. Most of the time.

The program is crashing in one of these pre-generated areas. Code I didn't write. Code that Microsoft wrote. Code I have nothing to do with. Dammit!

It's Microsoft's fault, but I'm going to have to fix it. And odds are, what I'm going to have to do is make a *new* application in DevStudio, let it pre-generate a skeleton again, and then rebuild the tester application from scratch.

Microsoft, I hate you.