quirks

/TECH
As most design and development is apt to have, SharePoint 2010 and its associated software has quirks. These quirks can be documented or undocumented, but they eventually come up as someone out there is trying to use SharePoint in some specific way. I use Infopath and SharePoint Designer a lot as I design and develop custom forms. One of those quirks has become apparent to me as I was struggling for several hours one day to get a workflow functioning correctly. This workflow was trying to compare a username to a person field returning the login name as a string. SharePoint 2010 is new to me and the string builder features are much improved over 2007. One of those features however broke a workflow. It turns out that the new string builder treats the '\' just like most programming languages: it's an escape character. Thus when I had it trying to concatenate a '\' in a string, the lookup following it kept failing as it was no longer being a lookup but a string literal. Again, as with programming using 2 '\' actually inserts the character into the string.

/EXISTENCE
Speaking of escapes, currently I've gone through another bout of gaming remorse, this time from Diablo 3. I spent an unhealthy amount of time on the game over the last weekend, thus not getting useful things done, like working on my projects this blog is supposedly helping me follow through with, finishing my re-organization project, getting a haircut, doing laundry, or going grocery shopping. Was it worth it? The frustration and self-defeating said "No, and you're a loser for wasting all that time".

But I know I'm not a loser. It takes me a little bit of time to get over the initial depression that sets in, but then it turns into a priority defining moment for me. It was because of those thoughts and the realization that I can actually do something about those problems that in the time between writing the previous paragraph and this one, I went and got my hair cut and grocery shopping. It's amazing at how much better I felt after something as simple as getting my hair cut.

The same thing goes for work. Last week by Friday I was burned out. I was just wasting the University's money by sitting there while I did nothing but stare blankly at my screen. So I left early. Today I went to work and before I knew it, it was time to leave. In fact I stayed a little longer today because I needed to finish something before I left. Perhaps there's hope for me yet on accomplishing 40 hours per week.

Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.

back to work

/TECH
Doppelgänger still doesn't have a power supply, but I've been waiting until I got back to work before I began spending money on the project. The PSU is just the beginning for the system. For the time being, I'm going to use my old AMD Athlon 64 x2 hardware. I've only got 2GB of DDR RAM for it currently, but I hope to replace all the core hardware before the end of the year. The hardware I'm looking at putting into the case is an AMD A-series CPU+GPU, an accompanying FM1 motherboard, and at least 16GB of DDR3 RAM. I'd prefer 32GB, but we'll see what I can afford throughout the year.

On that note, as of yesterday I'm once again employed and continuing work for Whitworth University. It's a great place. Of course I have some complaints about the work and the area, but those issues are far less significant than being able to say, "I'm employed, eating well, enjoying my evenings in the house I live in, and sleeping comfortably." But this is tech talk, so let me elaborate on the issues I'm currently dealing with at work.

As a brief intro, I work with Microsoft SharePoint creating custom forms with InfoPath. Our current project is migrating from SP 2007 to SP 2010, which is one of the issues I'll discuss. The other issue is providing support for existing forms with both InfoPath 2007 and 2010 installed on my workstation.

If you've ever had to upgrade even a personal computer, you know that migrating data from the old version to the new version doesn't always go smoothly. I love advertising that states it's simple and seamless. Bollocks. It's only simple if all the conditions are right and when is a server ever perfectly stable and up to date with the latest hotfixes? I've been developing custom forms for our SP2007 environment for the past two years and although I don't have to re-learn everything, I have to become acquainted with the quirks of each environment and the quirks that come with the conversion process. On top of this only some of our forms are actually being converted to 2010; some are remaining in the 2007 format but being published to the 2010 environment.

One of the InfoPath 2010 quirks is that you cannot specify a rule in a form that only stops the remaining rules from running. Every rule must have at least one action and stopping the remaining rules doesn't count. To mitigate this you simply have the rule edit a dummy field with nothing. Problem fixed, right? Well, the conversion quirk that comes with this is that when InfoPath 2010 imports the 2007 form it takes a look at the rules and any of those "stop" rules are removed. No warning. No making the rule invalid. Just remove the rule without notification. Microsoft, that was a stupid idea. This breaks a lot of the functionality in the forms I develop. I rely on that rule to stop the other rules from running and causing errors. And I don't even have to be converting. Even if I'm just publishing a 2007 form to the 2010 environment as is those "stop" rules disappear.

But we're going about this smart and we haven't pushed the 2010 environment into production yet. This means that we're running both 2007 and 2010 environments. As a result I have both 2007 and 2010 versions of InfoPath and SharePoint Designer on my workstation. However, because a key change to the contact selectors happened with InfoPath 2010 the two versions of InfoPath are incompatible. So when 2010 is the primary application I have to be cautious about editing 2007 forms with IP2007. The reason is that if there's a contact selector in the 2007 form I can't edit the control at all. So when I have to do maintenance on a 2007 form I have to repair the 2007 installation which takes time and requires the computer to be restarted. Then the next time I open 2010 it updates the computer again breaking contact selectors in 2007. It's a constant battle.

/EXISTENCE
Of course I talk about all this and remember that I have plenty of distractions awaiting me at home. These come in the form of a large Steam game library, a PS3, and my newest addiction: Minecraft. I'm a bit late to the Minecraft scene but Oh! how grateful I was late to the party. The game is so ridiculously addicting I'm sure I would have done much worse in classes had I purchased it earlier. In the course of 5 days I've probably sunk 50+ hours into it. I'm really happy I bought it during my vacation so that I could spend that initial period with it. And then there's my backlog of games I have yet to complete or even start! Hell, I even went as far as using a website to help me track that backlog, speaking of which I need to update.

Until next time:
Work hard. Play harder.