Hindsight is the mechanism that you use to wonder ‘What if’.

Only 19 days in the new year and I feel we’re already three months in. I’m busy blogging while my code here at work compiles and I can’t say I’m super thrilled to be doing sharepoint development. I did however build a decent HTML parser which sure does beat copying and pasting information from one database into an xml file. I don’t know why I waited 6 days to do it though.

Anyone else disappointed that Boston Market no longer makes frozen macaroni and cheese? I know I am. With the economy now in the downturn, it’s interesting going to Walmart these next couple of months to see what kind of people show up.

Who would have thought that at the end of the year the Cowboys, favored to get to the Super Bowl falls out of play off contention? Who would have thought a year removed from a record 1-15 season the Dolphins would have gotten into the playoffs with Chad Pennington? Oh NFL.

With my limited sharepoint development knowledge and I mean very limited, testing for cross browser compatibility is somewhat of a pain. Reading up on Microsoft’s strategy it makes no sense why the inclusion of basic level 2 compatibility (read: browsers that are not IE) was even brought up. You are delivering a crippled version of the full release in hopes to sway people back to IE? I’m not really sure but since IE stopped being developed for the Mac this isn’t the best train of thought.

Sharepoint is a very good idea and product for IE. But testing for Chrome, Firefox, Safari on Windows, Safari on Mac, Opera…this has been a headache where things appear in some and not in others. This very basic inclusion to allow other sites to access some parts is close to a half-assed business decision. Despite Microsoft leading in uses of OS around the world, they have to understand that accessing the net is not done globally with IE and entrenching sharepoint with IE just creates bigger and bigger headaches.

Rich HTML text editing? IE is not the only browser to do this so why only limit IE to do this? Now a sharepoint admin has to deploy a third party solution for what seems like a basic feature for all web browsers now. Oh wait. The rich HTML text editor was an Active X control. Ahh yes. This all makes sense now. I’m even sad to say that the third party app we use to get around this was commissioned by Microsoft and even then it’s not a simple or graceful solution. Everything feels hacked together.

Retrospectively I am glad I got laid off when I did because finding a job after the big bust and death of the American way of life would have been tons harder. Hindsight is always 20/20.

Here’s an interesting math problem I just worked on dealing with creating our own custom pagination and the maximum number of pages it will display. Originally it was this:


int maxPages = ListOfDescriptions.Length / PageSize;
if (maxPages != 0)
{
maxPages += ListOfDescriptions.Length % (maxPages * PageSize);
}
else if(ListOfDescriptions.Length % PageSize != 0)
{
maxPages = 1;
}


The above will produce 4 pages max if the length of the description is 8 and the page size is 3.
After I look at it in production and went back into the code I came up with this:


int maxPages = ListOfDescriptions.Length / PageSize;
if (ListOfDescriptions.Length % PageSize != 0)
{
maxPages++;
}


I tried some limited testing on it but I think this solves the max page problem. I’m trying to think of any other things I may have missed including numbers below the page size but those seem to have been taken care of.

Ahh a good day of bug tracking and work.

Next up with be catching up with sharepoint and rolling onto another flagship product. I’m pretty excited about this.

Note: the code html tags are weird with adding weird spacing and not allowing me to space my code out.