Friday, April 30, 2004

A Week has gone by

Well, I know I haven't been very good that last couple of weeks about blogging everyday. I have two projects due, pretty much today, and my asthma has been acting up. So by the time I get home, if I have any energy, I am working. If not, then I am sleeping.

Asthma and the Attacks, not just a band anymore
Last night was little tough, I had a pretty good asthma attack. It was one of those that just shuts you down.

It was interesting, I was trying to think how to describe it. I mean, you take all of your medicine, but that doesn't make it go away. It just makes it think about going away. So you end up laying there, and sleeping, but it's not like regular sleep. Because your body has been lacking in oxygen, it just kind of goes to sleep, but your mind isn't sleeping. You can hear everything and feel time go by and you kind of can't do anything about it. I heard my beautiful Wife come in to the room to check on me, but, I couldn't really acknowledge that I knew she was in the room. Also because you are trying to move but can't really, you feel really heavy. Where regular sleep you don't feel like you are made of stone.

So after about three to four hours of this kind of sleep your body will start responding to your mind. But everything is slow and an effort. It's one of those things that I don't talk about much. It's not the focus of my life, it is just one of those things I deal with. But today I thought, hey maybe I will write about it so that you would know what it was like. Well enough about that.

NDoc and Documenting Code
So I have got the one project pretty much wrapped up. I have written a lot of code that is reusable, and helpful. It authenticates with Active Directory, uses AD groups to see whether the user has access to the application and what perrmissons they have, if they do have access. It uses XML to help archive the documents, giving the user a current and archived view on the fly. A WYSIWYG (what you see is what you get) editor written to work in the Internet Explorer browser, and is written in JavaScript and XSL so that I can use it to edit content that is stored in XML if I am so inclined (I was).

So will all of this code I need documentation to let others in the company use it and see what I Was thinking right? So am I going to sit down and type it all out in Word? No! I comment my code in C# using XML comments, and then when I build the project it gives me a xml file with every function documented! Now we have to make it human readable (I think that XML is human readable, but I am among the minority) . So I downloaded NDoc. This is a great program that takes that xml file and the dll that is created for your project and generates MSDN like documentation. Now .NET developers live and die by this stuff, so this is as good as gold. I can hand the project off to any other .NET developer and they can pretty much pick it up from there! Good stuff.

Tuesday, April 27, 2004

Riding and XML

Well, the camping/riding trip was great. It was really relaxing and I got to ride a lot. The ole' XR 500 did just great. The 30 dollar ebay shock worked great and over all it was a lot of fun to ride. I really enjoyed the long group ride. It's really cool seeing 10 bikes scooting across the dry lake bed. There are some pictures on the photoblog. Saturday we had a nice surprise, my Beautiful Wife called and said, "Hey, I'm at Kramer Junction, come get me". I was so thrilled she came. Everyone was!

So sunday morning, we hopped on a quad and went for a little ride. It was something that I have always wanted to share with her. I don't know what it is about dirt riding, I just really enjoy the feeling and the visuals of it all.

Well, the train is getting close to work, I will talk about the XML portion of this post a little later.