Louis Kessler’s Behold Blog

I almost got the beta out today. But it was my change to a new computer six months ago that did me in.

I finished up and compiled the package. Then I had to make the install script. Whoops. I didn’t have it. Had to download InnoSetup and install it. Then I had to set up all my links again because everything on my new computer is in different directories. One very hidden setting prevented InnoSetup from working for me and it was an hour until I found that and fixed it.

So once I got the install set up, I had to test it. I installed the new version of Behold, and tested it. The welcome screen came up fine. Closed that. My Good Ideas box pops up. Close that and an exception occurs crashing Behold. What happened? I actually hadn’t tested my Good Ideas box since before I upgraded Delphi, and I had unchecked the option back then. Here was a new install and it appeared by default. But it was hooked into the old version of LMDTools, before I upgraded to their 2009 version. So it abended. Getting it linked back again wasn’t easy and that took another hour.

Then I noticed that the hyperlinks in the Good Ideas weren’t working. Actually, they may never have been working. This was obviously an easy thing to fix. But it ended up taking me 2 hours to fix it.

Despite all that, I still would have got the beta out today. But then it came to the code signing. I had to download and install Microsoft’s software development kit (oh, what a pain) and then get my old certificates and put them on my new machine. With that done, I attempt the signing and … it doesn’t work. I now have a ticket in with Comodo to help me get the code signing going again.

I suppose I can get the beta out without the code signing, but I might as well wait until tomorrow to see if I get an easy fix from Comodo.

Alas.

For the beta, I want to fix all outstanding errors in Behold. There are certain types of errors that are of the type that can make a program crash. It will be stuck there and not continue or even allow you to close the program. Often the only way out is to use Ctrl-Alt-Delete and start the Task Manager and use it to end the hung program.

Examples of an exception is an array out of bounds, accessing an invalid memory location, or a division by zero. Often an error message pops up that has some fancy wording that is unintelligible to most people, but once leaving the message box, the program gets lost.

So with the help of a program called EurekaLog, Behold will now pop up a friendly box whenever one of these exceptions happens:

The beauty of this is that it will capture all the debug information and allow the person using Behold to easily send me an email containing mostly everything I need to find and fix the problem.

Now I’m sure you’re saying “I’ve seen this before”. Of course you have. Windows does this to you all the time. You often have things pop up like this:

I’ve often clicked on the “Send Error Report” button. But with Microsoft, I’ve never got any response back. So much so, that I almost feel I’m sending these things into a black hole that they just ignore.

To be fair, they probably get millions of them, all the same, for the same problem. And they most likely do fix the problem for the next release. They just can’t get back to every one of the millions who submit it.

What this also does is let Behold encounter its severe errors gracefully. Behold should not get stuck. If in that run it encounters 2 more errors, you’ll then get an  option to terminate the program.

I hope this will save me time and you from the annoyance of possible program crashes during the beta.

We’ve been having beautiful fall weather here in Winnipeg for the last few weeks. Temperatures about 10 deg C (50 deg F).

I was out yesterday at lunch for a walk and I passed by the Canadian Museum of Human Rights, a $260 million world-class museum that is currently in its initial stages of construction in Winnipeg. I took a picture:

It reminded me of Behold, now in alpha soon moving to beta.

Then I came to the display that said what was to come:

This reminded me of Behold version 2.0.

The race is on. Who will be first?