Tomorrow only has 3 meetings so I should be able to work on my bugs.  I checked today and I've got 20 bugs on my plate.  Its a little high, but the worst part is that 8 of them are Dev 10 bugs.  They put you in "bug jail" when you have more than 8.  Missed it by that much.

When I got back I had a boat load of email to go through.  I admit that I cheated and checked my work email a few times while I was on vacation.  I probably went through a 100 or so emails before coming back.  I'm surprised how much email I got.  I figured since all of MS was shutdown for most of that time I would only really get the automated emails.  Not only was I wrong, but I even had people waiting for replies on the 5th when I got back.  Dang OOF message saying when I was coming back. hehe.  Anyhow, all is done and now I'm fully caught up.

Today for the most part I've been working on my commitments.  I've finished going through my old ones figuring out which need to be updated or dropped.  Also I started creating the 6th commitment for the new team I'm on, content management.  Luckily there are a few tools that I'll get to work on in this space so I'm putting them on the list now.

I'm also adding my comments about what I have done so far.  Which of course pointed out that I haven't done enough community work this year.  I need to get on it quickly.  I'm about 24 hours behind the curve.  I need to spend at least 2 hours a week from now on to make up the time loss.  Our main community person (KarinM) is in my team so it shouldn't be to hard to find something to work on.  I already sent her an email about working on a few blog posts for our main team blog.  Perhaps here in a few weeks I'll have a post to point to.

More on the work front; I think we figured out a good method of tracking our work on the CAM team.  It looks like I'm going to be spammed with bugs to fix.  At least now that we are in Wix they are not that difficult to track down and fix.  I imagine I'll be an expert at our authoring here in just a few.  Never mind the fact that I wrote most of it while I was on the scrum team.  I wonder when I'll get help with this. Bah! That's what tools are for right? Lol.  Speaking of, I got authorized to work on some tools again.  That makes me very happy indeed.  A programmer with nothing to work on but XML files is not a happy programmer.

Well the wife just called and once to go home.  I'll have to cut this post off a little short.  Maybe next time I'll talk about the super yummy prime rib roast I had for both Christmas and new year's dinner.  Also, I apologize for this stream of consciousness blog post.  Normally I write it then go back and edit it.  Just don't have the time today.

P.S. I know I'm the only reader.  But still.

As the only dev on the team I think I'll be responsible for fixing any bugs found in our current releases (authoring not the actual samples or docs) and porting those fixes to our next release.  Karin also is in charge of the group blog.  So that might mean I'll need to write some of the blog posts.  Good thing I have been practicing here.

I was looking into the vs\VSData\Package\UnitTests tests.  These tests were providing more information in their error messages than the tests were expecting.  It turns out that these tests were the retail version instead of the checked versions.  This caused the difference in error message.  The checked versions normally have a lot more verbose information than the retail versions.

Anyhow, the retail version of the tests were on all of the tests boxes.  This lead us to think that the test submission might have the wrong path for where to pick up the tests.  Sure enough, when we checked the submission the path was wrong.  This most likely means that we will have to resubmit the testing.  That normally takes between 1 and 2 days to complete.  If that is the case then we will most definitely miss our check in time of 9PM.

Curtis in the mean time is submitting the LKG build shelveset.  At least half of the work will get checked in.  And I'm a little happy that its the stuff that I worked on that will get checked in.  Time will tell for the inbox  content submission.

We are completely test clean for the retail builds of both LKG and inbox!

This is a huge milestone.  I know we would get here at some point, but actually getting here feels quite nice.  All of our remaining work will be on the checked versions of the 2 builds.  These errors are far lower priority since they are only seen in the debug build with all debugging turned on.  This normally creates a much larger number of errors.  Almost all of which would be assert failures.

So our current status of both paths is.

• 1 error in LKG
• 3 errors in inbox

Curtis is working on LKG and I've taken over investigating inbox.  For LKG Curtis thinks the error is from a missing registry key.  So he has filed a bug (which allows us to RI) so we don't have to worry about LKG at all any more.  All we need to do now is check it in.  For inbox I discovered that the test box was missing Mahmoud's fix for 1 of the tests.  After the fix was applied the test passed.

At this point we are down to just 2 errors for all of these super complex projects.  Both errors are for the checked version of inbox.  I'm investigating the vs\VSData\Package\UnitTests and Curtis is working on vs\VSD\datatools\ParameterizeQuery.  Both have emails out to the test owners, but you know that's not enough.  In the mean time the investigation continues on our side.

For my error I've discovered that the test seems to be very flaky.  There are some bugs already open for the test; one for each version after ours.  I'm hoping that the changes are known (at least to the test owner) enough that I can see if reverting them could fix the test.  If that is the case then we can just file a bug and submit anyway.

Tomorrow should bring results from both emails.  The people are in China so it takes a day turnaround for us to get anything back.  I sure hope these guys have an idea of why stuff fails.

I think this change is keyed on the completion of all of the LKG work. I've been working on the build portion and the rest of the group has been working on the content part. Both seem to have finished at the same time. Right now I'm doing the RI of the content up to the VC branch. And tomorrow I'll start the work to do the same thing for the build part. And hopefully by the Sunday we will have both payloads completed and out of our hands.

Feels so nice to get jobs done. I'm looking forward to see what I'll be working on next. I know it will have something to do with our new interop work. Maybe work on Vista bridge or something. We will see soon enough.

In other good news we might be able to meet all of our goals for M3! Jeff told me that he had looked over the time line and if all goes well with this smoke testing then we will still be on time for the M3 milestone. I could have sworn we were not going to make this. We had so many discussions about when the last possible day would be and what our contingency plans are. At least now we probably won't need them.

Today I'm doing all of the work needed to get a full test run in our parent branch. Once I'm done collecting and sorting the data I'll submit the test run on all 3 platforms. Then off to home. Maybe enjoy a movie with my wife for a change. I'm crossing my fingers for not working next weekend.

Right now we have 2 machines building the amd64 flavor of VS. We are doing 2 machines so that we can verify any errors that 1 of them has if they do get any errors. I'm assuming they will not have any errors since last night's builds were clean except for this 1 issue.

I know this is dev work but I can't wait to get back to a normal project. I want to write some new code. I'm missing it.