I'm getting quite busy these days, so I'm sorry I cannot reply right away to all the precious feedback of the my former posts. Right now, I'm finishing a .NET CF application that is causing me a lot of trouble... you know, all the small things that do no work on CF can drive you crazy. In particular, I'm getting annoyed to have to wrap each and every event handler with a try-except statement: if you fail to do so even a trivial error can cause the application to terminate, losing all of its data.
The funniest (or most annoying) thing I found out today is that to save space on the PocketPC the default deployment lacks some error messages. So, from time to time, instead of an error you see "Unable to load resource assembly". This means the app was about to display a specific error, but could not find the matching error string. Luckily enough, this 90KB assembly called System.SR.dll can be deployed on the machine, although is officially for debugging purposes only (end-user deployment seems to be illegal, according to some web sources I found), because the application should provide its own messages... but how do you figure out what went wrong?
As the program had be to be ready for .... yesterday, I don't have a lot of time for the blog. Today, I rolled out a custom SOAP call code (an HTTP call with a hand-made XML SOAP message), as the default one was causing me a lot of trouble for redirection to multiple servers and to manage passwords.
Not that things will get quiet soon. I'm flying to Oslo (Norway) next week to teach a class. Don't know if the weather will be worse than here (it has been snowing for several days in my area, quite unusual for the end of November). In the following week I'll give an in-depth seminar on Delphi 2006. Lots of material to prepare, lots of features to study, again little time for blogging and mailing...