Stupid Software Companies (20090217)

Adding the new API to ballista to expose the planet positions etc.

Extending the new web service to return natal aspects and house positions.

Spending a really stupid amount of time dealing with inconsistencies in the piece of rubbish Microsoft call a development environment. Whilst debugging the web service, sometimes the debugger will let me step into an underlying DLL, the next time it won't, with nothing changing (apart from a restart of the same debugging session.) Sometimes rebuilding the underlying DLL helps, more than often - not.

I'm sure someone must have done some research on how much time is spent dealing with the development environment Microsoft provide, and how much time is spent on actually debugging.

Had more fun with Microsoft, when, after copying new DLL to the test VM, got the most informative message in the world "The application failed to initialise (0xc0000022). Click OK to terminate the application." Absolutely wonderful. No enlightening message as to why it terminated. Some googling turned up that 0xc0000022 meant access denied. One would think a message "Access denied trying to open 'X'" would be useful. I must be too stupid to work with
Microsoft products. In the end, using Filemon, I finally worked out which file had a problem, and which user was trying to open that file.

Deployed the new web service method to the test VM, and sent out a mail about same. Finished the evening by throwing more ebola infected darts into a MS Windows XP OEM package.