What causes bugs?

I think that developers have a good handle on the idea of bugs in the code, but the thing that I want to focus on is informing other people, who are not developers, how bugs form.   If we can help others to realize how bugs can form we can eliminate the amount of communication that is wasted trying to explain where the bug came from or why it happened all of a sudden. 

We have all had those changes because of business requirements that everyone that isn't a developer blames for creating bugs until the next major change.  What "everyone that isn't a developer" doesn't realize is that there are other variables that play a major factor in the creation of software bugs.  

As technology increasingly gets better, faster, more convenient, etc. the list of things that directly affect your code increases greatly and there is probably a formula for it that follows the Fibonacci sequence or some other fun algorithm like that.

What "everyone" might not know is that an increase in traffic to a site or server can cause things to change on the server, or cause an admin to make changes that will adversely affect your code.  You will not be notified of these changes, whether they be from traffic flow or an admin. In the ideal world, you would know the second a change happens that is going to affect your code,  you can plan for these things and you might even have alerts set up to tell you when traffic increases to your site or application, but if an admin makes a change to a server or a setting on the server, you may never know until something goes wrong with your site or application, and you will be banging your head against the wall trying to figure out why all of a sudden this bug appears out of nowhere.

Another thing that can really throw a monkey wrench into your code is something that was meant to keep bugs away or increase security,  an update.  I am not talking about the ones that "everyone" is thinking of, like the updates that you (or someone in your team/company) have made to another part of the application,  this is what "everyone" immediately thinks broke the application when something isn't working the way it previously did, this is the major update that "everyone" blames bugs on.  I am talking about updates to operating systems, IE, Edge, Cortana, text readers, PDF readers, other browsers, just about anything that needs updating that has to do with some part of your application.

Something else that "everyone" doesn't realize affects your application is the hardware that it is run on, not just your user interface but also the data server, the web server, the application server, the whatever server.  This likely won't cause issues with your application, but it is a possibility that it could cause an issue. Sometimes when we are creating a site and we use certain frameworks, those frameworks rely on a certain hardware structure or a combination of hardware structure and software settings on that piece of hardware, so when the combinations are changed, there is sometimes a chance of it causing a bug in your application.  Let's say that there isn't a lot of memory usage on the server, so someone says hey let's dial back the memory on this server and use it somewhere else (the things you can do with Virtual Machines), now something that doesn't run all the time gets run and you get an out of memory exception, it didn't happen before, why is it happening now?  now you have to do one of two things, rewrite the code to use less memory for this one process, or convince the controlling party that you need X amount of memory on call.

Knowing that bugs happen and how they happen, helps you to prepare for them to happen and how to communicate what happened to who needs to know this bug happened.

So, what causes bugs?

EVERYTHING

Installing XNA for Visual Studio 2015

I was asked about installing XNA into Visual Studios 2015 because I noted that it was very simple and straightforward.

I knew that there were others like me who are still using XNA so I knew that a Google search would do plenty to help me find how to get my project working in VS2015 (community)

My search quickly brought up a a Stack Overflow answer that points to an updated post by MXA with the title "XNA 4.0 Refresh (Visual Studio 2015)", which was last updated in November of 2015.

This site gives you a single downloadable .zip file to download, and then instructions on what you need to do to install all the components necessary for installing the extension itself

Once you have unpacked the .zip file, just install the pieces one by one in the order given, they don't take long at all.

Before install extension:

1. Install DirectX
2. Install Xna Framework 4.0 Redistribution
3. Install Xna Game Studio 4.0 Platform Tools
4. Install Xna Game Studio 4.0 Shared

Once the last one finishes, just double click the extension and it will install it, and you are ready to roll.  

I wasn't paying complete attention to my computer while I was doing this, so I can't give you a good estimate about how long it really took.  the download was painfully slow because of the connection that I was on, but the installing the packages didn't seem to take very long at all. 

My Project was already created prior to installing XNA into VS2015, so I don't know how easy it is to get started or set up the different types of projects.  I look forward to doing some development in XNA though.

Code Stock

There has been a lot of talk around the office about Code Stock lately because the deadline for submitting talks is Friday at midnight (EDT).

Being a contractor it is not mandatory for me to submit a talk, but that doesn't mean that I can't submit a talk, so I have been throwing around the idea of writing something up.

When I started working here I didn't have very much (read as any) experience with AngularJS, I have worked with jQuery and AJAX a little bit and that has given me a little bit of a boost working with AngularJS, so I decided that I would talk about the process that I have been using in order to catch up to the rest of the developers here.

Check out Code Stock, sounds like it is going to be an awesome get together!

Old Code, You Wrote

Do you ever go back to code you had written a long time ago and wonder who had written it and why they made it so messy?

I realized that I need to go through my documentation for some of my first projects here (or actually write the documentation).  While looking through the code I have seen things that I really want to change or improve, not that the code I had written before was bad, but the code could be better.  The only problem that I face in doing this is that then the code needs to be tested and compiled and pushed to production, and some of these projects have their feet in many places all at once.

I think that what I am going to do with this code (since I am short on time, most of the time) is to change some of the things that don't change the flow of logic.  I am talking about things like using blocks where before I didn't have them because I didn't know about them when I first wrote the code. 

The rest of the changes I think I might just put into the documentation of the code in a section labeled "Future Updates", or something of the like.  If the change isn't too ​big, but something that I don't want to change and not test for fear of breaking the code, I am going to write a little comment where I would make the change, something that would make complete sense to whoever looks at it, especially me.

​​​​​How do you document code?