Struggling with Visual Studio 2008 and Scripts
Today has been a day of struggling with Visual Studio 2008, C# and VBA scripts. It's not my favorite suite of tools, but I didn't get to pick them, and there was a bug that needed to be fixed, and this was the easiest way to fix it.
There's a Windows app with an exposed COM interface and the VBA script 'talked' to it and set it in a state ready to do some work. Then the C# app hit it and did the work, but the end result was that the numbers weren't right. So I had to find out what was wrong, and why.
To it's defense, Visual Studio 2008 is a decent windows development IDE. It's got all kinds of nice things to make it easier to develop and debug an app, but it's the fact that I've been away from Windows for so long that getting back into it is just painful. There's no gdb and make, and it's C# as opposed to Java or C or C++. So it's a struggle for every little thing.
In the end, I was able to set breakpoints and see that the values weren't what I expected. There was a bug in the VBA script and the value folks thought were defined, really weren't, and so were assumed to be zeros by VBA. This caused all kinds of problems, the upshot of which was the numbers were wrong.
By defining the enum values in the VBA script, all of a sudden everything worked. The C#, the underlying app... it all just worked. All for the lack of a few undefined variables. I had wondered where these were defined, but the answer I kept getting was "in the DLL". I had my doubts, which is why I was able to see this problem, but it's just another reason I'm not fond of Windows programming.
Life would be so much simpler if I could code on my Mac all day long. Or linux... that's not horrible, but it's not as sweet as the Mac.