Software Development

Unity C# - Troubleshooting -Beginners - Won't Work - Tips and Tricks - Broken - Error - Stack Trace

noreply@blogger.com (na) — Sun, 22 Oct 2017 05:22:00 +0000

DRAFT - Feedback please!

Tips and Tricks for Weird or Odd Issues in Unity or any software.

Ever had that issue\bug that ate so much of your time and it turned out to be the dumbest thing?

Here are some tips suggestions:

Come up with time limits like:

Spend 10 minutes just figuring it out.
Spend 10 minutes researching.
Spend 10 minutes reading the manual.
Spend 10 minutes discussing it with someone.
Rinse and repeat randomly till you find a solution or read on.

Make sure you have steps to reproduce the error.

Write them down on PAPER\PEN. I don't like pencils for this. It's just smoother with a pen. Do what you want.
Yes use paper and pen. Get out of your element. Get away from the computer.
I feel users should type this up if they found it.
Try to reproduce it another way and compare.

Go for a walk.
Learn what the back-burner method is.
Meditate.
Talk to a co-worker or friend
Eat good food.
Go relieve yourself.
Check your health.
Have good posture.
Remember the Originator.
Restart\Reboot.
Talk to the software\machine. Sometimes being harsh works sometimes kind words will help.
Listen to Bob Dylan.
Now a days all tools build internal objects including Unity. Sometimes things just don't build right. It happens. Deal with it. How:

Recreate the object.
Deactivate and Reactivate the Object(s), make some change that will trigger a rebuild of the code.
This is not a first resort tool.
It's after you think you are going crazy. You are not something broke in the builder and you have to redo it. Deal with it don't moan.
We have seen examples in Powerbuilder, my first.
We have seen examples in MSCRM and we may be posting some links here. Google this:

"invalid transition of stage business process flow"

The solution is to deactivate and activate the process

Very likely to happen after system upgrades. Some upgrades, imports, add-ons, etc. deactivate things. like
Unity Example: We had a weird issue. Checking Static and Un checking fixed it. You can see logs showing things are building.

READ the stack trace ASCII Letter by ASCII Letter....what? Just read the stack trace very carefully if you have one. We may provide examples where this happened that goes for any other tip. We had one issue that had the answer in the first line of the stack trace, but because I'm blind or the formatting was off or I just read over it I spent hours. Then when I read the line I knew exactly where to go.
Use a decompiler legally to read the code of a function in a stack trace.
Copy and paste AND\OR don't. We've been bitten by a copy and paste from one application to another. The copy paste worked but the code wast translated incorrectly. There was a bug in one the application regarding Unicode. I believe it displayed fine but did not copy and paste correctly. The point try both or be cognizant of this. This may have resulted from an IM chat where two parties had different languages set up.
Lastly know in your heart of hearts that you have already found the solution.

Excel Macro - User Defined Function (UDF) - Pull single values from another Excel sheet; closed or opened...

noreply@blogger.com (na) — Wed, 29 May 2013 08:47:00 +0000

Intro:

Our team was asked to help a gentlemen with an Excel problem.

He was pulling a value from another excel file(source.xls) in about a 100 fields in another excel file(destination.xls) which he manually updated each month.

We set the intern off to research and experiment. He learned about the Excel VBA function INDIRECT but it only worked if the file was open. Our requirement had no mention of the file being open or not. So, we decided to make it work both ways. We researched some more and found some VBA code pasted in various blogs and forums. All had some type of issue where it either would not compile ( probably due to character sets ) or would just not work. So....we put together something of our own......

Donate to the developers that provided this solutions...

~+~+~++~~+~+~+~+~+~++~

Code and Setup:

Download zip file and place files in the directories on your machine:

c:\temp\source.xls
c:\anywhere\destination.xls
C:\temp\folder wit space\file with space.xls

Press Alt + F11 or Tool -> Macros -> Visual Basic Editor - TODO: Add instructions for newer versions of Office.

Click on This Work Book in the Project Explorer. You will find clean up code.

Then Click on Modules\Module1 to see the code that pull the data.

Warning: During testing we found some instances where the source file was left orphan requiring you to kill all EXCEL.EXE processes. We tried to handle as many as possible. Here is code to kill them automatically - Use with caution - Save your work! Backup, Backup, Backup!

Open up your command line ( Start + Run OR Windows +R ) and type or paste the following code:

taskkill /im excel.exe /f

Donate to the developers that provided this solutions...

~+~+~++~~+~+~+~+~+~++~

WordPress Broken Links

noreply@blogger.com (na) — Sun, 30 Dec 2012 18:43:00 +0000

This post relates to:

WordPress
Permalinks
Broken Links - When PermaLinks in WordPress were changed.
Search Engines Optimization (SEO) - You changed your WordPress settings due to a SEO suggestion.

In a hurry?

Short Version:

Add the BASE HTML element to HEAD of your HTML.

Learn More:

Long Version:

Our company recently started providing Search Engine Optimization. I was tasked with taking and existing website and convert it to WordPress. Our goal was to utilize the WordPress architecture to optimize our customers sites in search engines.

During the process I was asked to Change the PermLinks to the post name. Well this broke my links to pages and images.

I researched many methods that worked, but couldn't find a simple solution. They all required going through each link and chaining them. I had 22 pages and they had links too! So, I thought to come up with my own solutions. Being a programmer the first thing I thought of was too hack into the code and programmatically changing all the links, but that required either debugging to find where I needed to change code or reading through the documentations, not to mention I would have to test out multiple scenarios to make it right. This would be just a time consuming to change each link if not more. It would be a nice plugin to have. Time was a big factor. I couldn't help but think this can't be the first time this has happened to a web developer. I recalled the BASE element from years back. Researched it and tried it. Worked in 10 minutes!

Accounting Software

noreply@blogger.com (na) — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 08:12:00 +0000

Quickbooks - great for Small Businesses - hire from a pool of experience users - many plugins to choose from - ability to create custom plugins.

Free Solutions - Use a database or spreadsheet - most popular solutions offer templates some sort of template for accounting - down fall new staff will have a learning curve.

Mac or PC

noreply@blogger.com (na) — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 08:08:00 +0000

I help people fix computers and I often get asked the question should I get a Mac or PC.

My most common response is stick with what you have. Each has it's pro's and con's.

My reason comes from my experience. I worked with windows for 15 years I know it. Back in January of 2012 I joined a company that furnished the software developers with Mac books. The biggest draw back as a programmer that heavily uses a machine was re-training my brain to work like Mac users have been programmed to work. It's beens 7 months and I still am not to the speed I was on a windows machine.

Project Managment

noreply@blogger.com (na) — Thu, 27 Sep 2012 05:12:00 +0000

I recently asked a successful project lead what his trick was and this is what I got:

Testing is the number one priority.

Institute a culture and rhetoric of test driven development.

You should change responsibilities of a lead software developer.

Leads should have the responsibility of creating tests (unit and integration) and communicating with quality assurance.

Tests should be created before code is written by the developer. This will have unintended consequences such as forcing the developer and\or lead to change code to match the others.

Should ensure tests are created by an individual that would have knowledge of new features (their units and unit integrations). They should be seasoned (by project) enough to have knowledge of identifying regression testing for quality assurance.

This would unintentionally cause leads who merge code to be more cognizant in their code review. Their tests will need to compile and any hiccups that quality assurance has will be handled by the lead.

Ideally the Lead would not work on tickets. The work created by this methodology replaces a QA Engineer and should increase the salary of Leads. It also promotes pair programming.

The assumption here is Leads do not handle managerial responsibilities.

Like the picture below suggests a leads job should be to make sure no bug passes to production.

Professional Test Driven Development with C# By Bender, James/ McWherter, Jeff