A Change Of Plans

Ok so basically, as of a few days ago, Fizzure was scrapped due to liability issues. Boo~ I’m sure you’re all so sad. But to me, it’s alright. Fizzure was a great learning experience. And to make up for it, I have another project – yet to be named – that will be a huge project and hopefully spread very nicely. I’m not going to reveal it to you (mostly because we havnt named it yet, [yes, I did say "we"] ), but it’s an original idea with some twists. We’ll see what happens. Not even sure what language we are going to use for it, though it is probably going to be C# again, despite my ever growing dislike for the .NET framework.

More updates later…

Fizzure Will Go Open Source – When It’s Ready That Is

I have decided that my peer to peer application, Fizzure, will be open source! Exciting, I know.

However, I don’t think that I will open the source until I have a working beta build. Right now its still in core development. And it has a long way to go. Only the client will be open source. The central server that all will keep the information organized will be private and closed source. Sorry fellas. Out of luck on that one.

Fizzure will be the first application that I will publish officially, so I’m not completely sure how to go about doing so. My friend suggested that since I’m opening the source I should put it under the GPL. Sounds like a good idea, but, how do I do this? If anyone has suggestions for a n00b like me on how to go about doing such that would be great. If not, I’m going to ask again later anyways, once it is closer to an actual release.

Great News For me – Less Work!

Despite last nights extreme anger over the fact that I thought I was going to redo the structure of my Fizzure application, I learned today that I most likely do not! And this simple fact makes me very happy. There is almost nothing I hate more than having to redo work.

I came into school this morning with some of my code in hand and went straight to my computer science room. My teacher (the ever brilliant Dianne Meskauskas) took a quick look at my code. As it turns out I had just made a small mistake of where I had placed the creation of one of my objects.

The error I kept getting was a NullObjectException when I tried to access an array. I had made the creation of the object inside of a timer, so each time the timer ticked, it was creating a new object. On the first time it ticks, it creates the object “o” of the OptionControl class and fills the array SharedDirectories. On the second tick, it recreates “o” and tries to access the now empty array SharedDirectories, thus giving me the NullObjectException

Here is the little code snippet :

private void timer1_Tick(object sender, EventArgs e) {
OptionControl o = new OptionControl();
if (count == 0) {
loadWhat.Text = "Finding Shared Directories...";
o.SharedDirectories = o.getSharedDirs();
} else if (count == 1) {
loadWhat.Text = "Scanning Directories...";
o.DoScan();
} else if (count == 2) {
loadWhat.Text = "Shared Directories Found!";
} else {
Dispose(false);
}
count += 1;
}


My mistake here is on the first line. This line needs to be taken out of there and made as a class variable instead of inside a method, that way it can be accessed from any of the methods and have the same data as well.

This Is What Happens When You Don’t Plan Your Projects!

Man, I am going to be completely honest with you.

I am very angry right now.

With my new project, Fizzure, I did what I always seem to do. I jumped into it. I got the idea a while ago and spent a week or so organizing some of my thoughts in my head. But that is the only place I organized them, and that was my mistake.

Once again, I got screwed over by not writing things down. I was up until about 4 A.M. last night working on this project (just because I could be) and I got stuck on an error. Which at 4 A.M, Isn’t all that unusual. But even today I couldn’t figure it out. Of course after wasting most of today on this error as well, I realized it was because almost my entire project was structured wrong and would not ever work if I continued programming the way I was.

So just like what normally happens. I have to delete a large amount of work, and almost start over. I’m sure you would be angry too! But, alas, I have no one to blame but myself. It is because I was too stubborn and lazy to write things down! But on the upside, it gives me something to do during my boring classes tomorrow. *laughs maniacally*

So a lesson I learned today about programming was to always write out some organizational thoughts about your project on paper before you start actually programming.

On the upside of things, I did figure out some useful things last night while I was working, like how to read and write XML as well as a small amount of file and directory handling – among other things. I believe I really just need to copy and paste a large amount of my code into different places. We’ll see.

First Update

I’ll start off by saying Hello to all of you reading this. Hello.

Heres a little bit about what I’m working on currently:

• Fizzure
  

  • Language: C#
  • Project Stage: Planning/Early Development
  • Other Involved Coders: None
  • Program Details: Fizzure is an optimized, user-friendly peer to peer file sharing client. It is meant for fast searching with advanced searching options. It includes many unique features which I will not disclose until closer to at least a beta build.

• Surge

  Language: C#

  Project Stage: Alpha Testing

  Others Involved Coders: None

  Program Details: Surge is a community program used to measure total bandwidth usage. It keeps track of how much Up and Down flow you have, and adds it up over time (information stored on central server). You can view your profile and others online and compare numbers. Includes features like disabled network interface checking, automatic network interface switching, manual network interface switching, account creation and editing, Up Down and Total usage.

Well that is what I’m working on currently. Please leave comments and suggestions, I would love some feedback on my ideas.