Today was an absolute sh*t fight. Starting from an entire morning where after I experienced several crashes with Visual Studio Express, that I thought I’d try the full version.

To do this though, I had to expand my VMWare virtual disk. So a quick:

vmware-vdiskmanager -x 45GB windevxp.vmdk

… and my virtual disk is now 45GBs! – I then had to resize the windows partition. I’ll post more on this straight after this post.

So with that done, I’m set to install Visual Studio, I thought yeah it should take about 5 – 10 miuntes…

BOY WAS I WRONG!

The installation took like 2 – 3 hours at least, so there’s a large chunk of my day gone. (Great… F*CK!) At this point though, I didn’t care anymore, I was bitter about the amount of work I’ve lost and the disruption caused by stupid Visual Studio Express randomly crashing! I just wanted the whole thing to be installed and start coding again.

» Read more: Just when I needed it the most, my weapon of rapid web development goes nuts!

Well, my current projects at work are a far cry from last year’s mission critical projects where I was on the edge of my seat, tapping my feet to the sound of inaudible rhythm, staring at the screen with unblinking eyes, gritting my teeth as I developed applications in an almost mechanical manner.

Now, I find myself carving up new designs for ancient projects and looking at the code base, I’m honestly surprised that it has managed to not only run, but make bank for the company it belonged to all these years. Caching really does save your ass, so does having a dedicated server you can pump hardware into.

In the past few weeks, I’ve carved up designs, chased several phantom display bugs (which ended up being typos – you would’ve known if you had been keeping up with my tweets) and went back to coding ASP like it was 1999.

Yes you read right, ASP! I’m currently trapped in legacy code world… negotiating screen real estate and dealing with browser laws and rules that change ever so slightly for each different version of browser software!

» Read more: Carving up designs & Programming like it’s 1999

It’s been a while since my last entry and this is due the dedication of my free time, when not working on client’s projects, to a certain in-house project.

Last week, I’ve quietly launched project chronus. A project which provides multi site administration system geared for collaboration. Project Chronus makes it easy for our website content admin people at DevProducts to keep track of numerous website projects placed under their control.

Project Chronus is the first project I’ve built with Zend Framework 1.8 and above (as in utilising bootstrapping with Zend_Application) that felt natural. I’ve built several projects with Zend framework 1.5+, but not as comfortably as I did with my recent project.

While Project Chronus is a project to be used for our own internal purposes, it served as a live project with enough real requirements to be effectively used as a sandbox for future projects we choose to undertake and in addition, set (and put to the test) standards for how we do things.

» Read more: Project Chronus: a Zend Framework/Dojo/Doctrine Project Quietly Launched