19
Sep
Really, really tired
Very, very worrying. I’ve been struggling to learn and use Microsoft’s Windows Presentation Foundation (WPF) for a major re-write of our application for the hospital. There’s lots of new things to learn, weird behaviours to discover and work-around, and a self-imposed 5 Oct deadline to finish it.
I wake up in the afternoon, and face the monitor screen with absolutely no direction on how to get what I want done. Should I use a canvas for the slide-out menu? Should I use a grid instead? Both exhibit weird and undocumented behaviour which I don’t discover until I take the plunge, and start coding. And then only after I get the majority of that feature up working, I find a show-stopping behaviour, and I would need to tear everything down, and start over again.
If it’s just once or twice, or if I had all the time in the world, I would have simply treated this as a learning experience. But the high hopes placed within this project has caused me a lot of hand-wringing, and there is so much internal and external pressure that I’ve gone beyond thinking about it. It’s just mind-numbing paralysis as I search the Internet for non-existent documentation on WPF quirks.
The result being that I’m quite drained and disillusioned. I look at the plans I’ve drawn up, and being forced to reduce them more and more. These failures are getting quite trying for me, that I’m beginning to doubt my own ability to code. Seriously, I’m starting to think that the problem is with me.
I really, really need to get away from it all. I’m weary.
on September 19th, 2009 at 9:38 pm
Welcome to the hell I was in only a few months ago.
It’s nothing to do with your skill; you’re in fact doing a better job of getting used to it than I am. The style of coding in WPF just happens to be so…different compared to the languages we’ve learnt prior to even starting the project. Better yet, we’re forced to adhere to the Composite Framework, MVVM and whatnot (which to be honest just adds to the complexity).
I’m so used to WPF, though, that I’m actually afraid I can’t get back to coding in proper Java. Hopefully I can adapt in time for SCJD, though. XD
Ganbarre! ( ^.^)/
on September 19th, 2009 at 11:15 pm
hi i am back here again.. really wish to hear yr brunei experience. Email me if possible tks
on September 22nd, 2009 at 3:42 pm
Hi Timothy, you can email me your questions, and I’ll see if I can answer them in a separate post for you. My email can be found under the Contact section