End of Week April 8th

 

The EOF bug I chose to fix has uncovered many flaws in Gateware, but they've since been patched up. Though, I've also learned how to not go about merging branches on GitKraken, as I lost my work on Monday afternoon due to an improper merge. Thankfully, I was able to recover my work using the tools provided on GitKraken. 

    
The bug that had me caught all day on Thursday involved unnecessary calls to Seekg inside the Readline() function for the Linux build of Gateware. Calling Seekg too often drastically hinders the performance of the Single Header Compiler to the point it would time out from taking too long. These unneeded calls were removed from mac and windows, but had been lost during my learning experience with using GitKraken's merge tool. They were recovered after returning to an older commit.

The last bug I managed to discover is, after my merge to recover lost work, was that the Linux Test machine was not building the GVersion file which the unit test files rely on inorder to function. This was caused by an internal issue in a CMake script

Getting close to finishing my first bug since joining the Gateware team!

 As the end of my first month approaches, I'm already looking back on what a great month I had with Gateware! I managed to get pretty far into my first bug, End of File detection. The only remaining issue is an error checking within GBlitter

GateWare Dev Week 1

 It's the end of the first week of studying and working on GateWare, and I've learned quite a bit! I setup my first unit test for GFile's ReadLine function to check for the end of a file. This bug did take a bit longer than I had hoped to solve, but the learning experience was much worth it!

Gateware Dev Day 1

Today I have started my blog posts about my journey as a Gateware dev! I'm excited to see all the things I'm going to learn over the next four months.

Got access to xbox

 From my last post, I had problems with the Xbox but that was quickly resolved and I got the Xbox to run GateWare. The problem was just logging in the account that was already on the Xbox, which has development access from Microsoft.

The next thing I did was have a meeting with Chase to see how he did his file pathing as that is the current problem right now. He did find a solution to get all the unit tests running by creating a catch in main.cpp. He tells me that there are duplicate unit tests when he was debugging. This may be due to the merge I did a while ago when I brought up the UWP branch to release.

As of now I am going through and searching for the duplicate tests and resolving those.

Reset my last reset

On my last post I said that I had successfully brought the App-Port-Dev-Merge (UWP) branch up to speed by merging it with the Development branch.... Turns out I was not successful. The problem was when I soft reset my branch head to a different branch. That just caused a Git problem which was confusing. What we did was a hard reset to development, this made my branch the same as dev. From there we  merged the UWP branch and solved all the merge conflicts.

As of now, the code compiles but there are errors. The main problem I ran into is file pathing used to get some UWP files. Right now they are getting pulled directly in the Unit Test files and should be moved into GFile. I have a meeting with Chase tomorrow so that should clear up many things.

Another problem I ran into relates to the Xbox the school issued me. The problem is that when i try to run the code on the xbox i get an error saying that the code can not open the Windows store app. This may be due to me not having access to the sandbox. There is an account already on the xbox but it is logged off. I tried making my own account but I need permission from Microsoft to get access to the sandbox. Until I can get that resolved I will have to go back into the Desktop side.

 

 

Getting you up to date

Its been a long while since I last posted, previously I was working with Linux and getting trying to get minimize events handled but to no avail.

After the Linux task, I moved on to creating a library dependency check system to see if any of GateWare's library would need a certain library enabled in order to run correctly. The check is a preprocessor check that runs on build time. There are two types of messages the user will get, either a warning or an error. This depends on what the user defines. By default the user will get warning messages but if defined, the user can force error messages or disable the checks all together.

I worked on the dependency checks for two weeks after the last post, or the last two weeks of June, which lead into a week long Summer break. When break was over I would be working on UWP.

During the break(last week) I did some research and had a meeting with the Chase Richards, who started the UWP portion of GW, to see where he left off. As always he was very informal and helpful.

At the beginning of this week GW had a meeting and we talked about where I would start and plan things out. During the meeting I brought up an outline I had made from my meeting with Chase and we started building a work-path from there. 

In my opinion the meeting went really smoothly, besides the fact that I am the only dev currently. I believe having the meeting with Chase proved to be a very good choice because it  provided me with an outline of what to do and it let me gather the correct information to justify the points in my outline.

From the meeting my work-path would be as follows:

- Get UWP branch up to date with development

- Port missing UWP libraries

- Isolate UWP code and iOS code in app files

This whole week I have been working on getting UWP up to date from 6 months ago. The first thing I was going to do was go step by step and merging up the Git timeline. The reason behind it was i wanted to see the changes happening before my eyes to I know what merge conflicts to choose. After two merges I decided to just attempt to merge up to our development branch. It seemed to work at first, when the Input and Graphics unit tests were disabled. If they were enabled however I would get linker errors that came from some tests.

Since it worked in a certain case I decided to keep the merge. The next thing to do was fix the linker errors, which caused a lot of headache. After some time staring at the code, I realized that UWP uses different API's than GW does for user input and for console windows. The reason for the errors was because the tests were enabled but we could not feed it the right data because UWP uses its own api. The solution to this was to disable the Input and Graphics tests if UWP is being used, even if the user enables them. This is done by this:

#if !defined(WINAPI_FAMILY) && !(WINAPI_FAMILY == WINAPI_FAMILY_APP)

#endif

This checks if the UWP api is being used.

I just had a meeting with Lari and Chase earlier today over messaging. We all are on the same page about where GW and UWP is at. Now that I have a stable build i will be testing for bugs and try to see if i can make my patch more efficient. Other than that the upcoming week I will start to work on porting missing libraries.

Link to predefined macro:

https://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/51f29cfe-d07f-4898-9962-945ed7b66d7f/predefined-macro-to-identify-uwp?forum=wpdevelop