roncli.com blog: June 2010

"Get some sleep," said Kathy as she left for work earlier this evening.

Yeah, right. When I get on a roll, it takes a lot more than a recommendation of sleep get me to hop off.

Tonight I was determined to get back into the Six Minutes To Release project and fix it up so that it works with my changes to the LibWowArmory project. Well, that I did, and then some.

The website doesn't compile just yet, but all of the associated libraries do. Also, everything is updated for Visual Studio 2010 and the .Net Framework 3.5 except for one project, which I will tackle tomorrow. The reason the website doesn't compile is because I decided tonight to get rid of the Ajax Control Toolkit in favor of JQuery UI controls.

The reason for this is because the Ajax Control Toolkit has some kind of minification MSBuildTask. That's great for people who don't already use minification, but I've gone so far as to code my own minification (plus combination, compression, and caching) library. It annoys me that I have to install something extra just to get code to run. So, Ajax Control Toolkit is out.

The only controls I was using was a calendar and dialog popup, both of which is provided in the stock jQuery UI release. I've been wanting to get away from Microsoft's Ajax for the jQuery (even Microsoft uses jQuery) because of the ease of use of jQuery and simplistic and low bandwidth Ajax calls compared to Microsoft's chunky code. This is certainly a good first step towards that.

Yup, I'm in full code monkey mode, and far be it for sleep to interrupt me for any longer than it has to.

Labels: Coding, Gaming, jQuery UI, LibWowArmory, Six Minutes To Release, World of Warcraft

Monday, June 14, 2010

"Eye" Yi Yi
Posted: 6:28:00 PM 0 comments

So it was two nights before my 33rd birthday. I was up late, tinkering with some things in Caesary, when I noticed something odd. As my eyes wandered around the web page, there were various letters coming in and out of my right eye's vision. Little tiny spots obscured my vision. It was late, but I figured I was just a bit too tired, so I went to bed, thinking it would be gone the next day.

Nope.

I got to work and noticed them again immediately. It scared me enough to see an eye doctor the following week. What they found was a little unnerving.

Vitreous detachment is a rare event for people under the age of 40, and in extreme cases can lead to retinal detachment, which can only be repaired with surgery. Fortunately, that is very low chance, and the fact that I still have 20/20 vision in my right eye gives me a measure of relief.

The process can take anywhere from 6 to 12 weeks to complete, so apparently there's a good chance that I'm going to be in for a visual show before all is said and done. For now, there's nothing good that can come of worrying about what might happen, so it's still business as usual.

But I must say, becoming a one-eyed pirate does have some appeal to it. Yarrrrrr.

Labels: Life, Vision

LibWowArmory 0.3 beta
Posted: 6:17:00 PM 0 comments

Well, it took me a lot longer than planned, but Visual Studio 2010 came with so many neat features, I had to convert LibWowArmory over and use them all.

And when I'm on a roll, I can't stop. Not only did I convert the project to VS2010, I also took the time to add three brand new classes to the mix. AchievementStrings is a class that returns strings of achievements and achievement categories, and is required by the new CharacterFeed class. The CharacterFeed class returns a list of events such as achievements and achievement criteria completed, bosses killed, and loot won.

But the grand opening of ItemTooltip is the one I'm most excited about. Thanks to Lukan Schwigtenberg, I was able to integrate all of the data that makes a WoW tooltip a WoW tooltip. There is a lot of data that you can get about an item now, and it will be interesting to see if it can be put to good use.

This release completes all of the character and item data you can get from the Armory. I also plan on working on guild, arena, and auction house data in the future, although I don't know when I'll get to it.

Besides, I have a ton of other projects to upgrade. Fun times!

Labels: Coding, Gaming, LibWowArmory, Lukan Schwigtenberg, World of Warcraft