Chillisoft Blog
 

The first year of university threws up a wide range of deliveries. If you’ll forgive my cricket jargon, some freshers are hit with a bouncer, others with a juicy half volley they can put away for four. Either way, by the time you’ve navigated your way to third or fourth year, you’ve already begun to build up a picture of this little workplace paradise that is all about lounging in your comfichair cranking up code projects that make whistles blow and dials spin. This is what a programming career must look like.
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Support can be a thorny issue.  Some industry problems are inherently tricky to analyse and solve with a computer application.  You sit down with a client and try to chisel up a set of requirements, but the list keeps growing with every meeting and new requirements pop up that shift the game plan.  This is not necessarily the client’s fault, but rather that it can be a strange process to describe what you do without thinking and to remember exceptions to the rules.  And of course, there are those businessmen that still believe in magic … that a software company can just walk in and develop an application from a requirements page that reads “1 of 1″ at the bottom.
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As a software development company with taylor-made packages for clients, we regularly receive phone calls from the clients with regards to bugs or small features.  If you’re a developer you’ll know well that it’s impossible to test an application completely, and some level of real-world usage is required to expose certain bugs.  This is all part of the process of moving from “release” to “stable”.

In order to set up a web-based bug reporting system, you’re basically presented with three options: build your own, buy a package or find a free, open source edition.  I must admit that building your own is an attractive option - you get the site to look exactly like you want, and I do enjoy web development.  What makes me squirm is the thought of having to cater for the niggling security issues and the hassles of setting up an attachment system and the like.  Taking on a well-worn system that you can customise just makes so much sense.
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When we introduced Habanero, we added a wide range of support options: a help form, a tutorial, a wiki using MediaWiki and a forum.  Using Dreamhost’s one-click install option was certainly an easy route to adding a forum, and their default option, phpBB, was one I’d used several times before.  I’ve had good experiences in general.
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I ran into an annoying feature of the DataGridViewCheckBoxColumn today.  Having set up a DataGridView with a checkbox column, I needed to know every time the user clicked the checkbox, so that I could update a total at the bottom of the screen.  The catch is that as soon as they click on the cell, it goes into edit mode, so the CellValueChanged won’t pick up the click until they click on something else.
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