I use Rick Strahl's wwhelp to document my apps. What are you using? John Harvey
-----Original Message----- From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] [mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] On Behalf Of Bill Arnold Sent: Thursday, September 28, 2006 10:22 PM To: 'ProFox Email List' Subject: RE: Agle Programming > What a load of crap. For most of this list a one man shop > has to do it all. Sorry if your thinking that the actual > owner would take this on in addition, but it's what you > should be doing all along. Does your Home Construction > Contractor draw up the blue prints at the end? I hope not. I'm re-writing an FPD product, which was a re-write of the original system written in mainframe assembler. By now the requirements and high level design are etched in my brain <s>. But I'm thoroughly documenting it, not anyway, but necessarily. First of all, there are just too many pieces for me to remember it all in detail, and the doc is a marvelous organizational aide. But also important: when the product does ship and truckloads of money arrive at the door, I will need to turn the work over to another programmer or even a team, so that's more to the story. My account of Royal Insurance was missing a piece, so that probably wasn't clear. In mainframe-applications programming land, design specs are typically fully worked out in advance, before work begins, so in that context what I said wouldn't have made much sense. The missing part was that I was a systems (versus applications) programmer, in a group responsible for the care and feeding of the OS's on a bunch of machines, so we weren't writing applications as such, but fixing, tweaking and measuring the operating system and also some 'utilities' we wrote and maintained for in-house things like managing tapes, jobs and printers. In this context, it was still necessary to document what we did, but it was often after the fact. That is, those were the heady days when the systems programmers had a lot of free reign because mgmt didn't understand them or exactly what they were doing, but because we all had to be responsible, it was worked out where a tech writer would basically follow us around and document what we were doing. > =========================== > > I drew the plans to my house, then built it! You make that sound so simple <s>. I had a plan too, beginning with the features list as developed over the years with customer input. Then I molded a screen architecture as an prototype, tweaking and changing it a hundred times until I was satisfied I had it right, and then the coding. At first I didn't fully realize that "porting" from FPD to VFP would amount to a total re-write, and that hurt, but I really like VFP so I did what I had to do. In hindsight, I should have been more careful with class libraries, but finally got the hang of it and will have to live with leaving some maintenance work for the future. Also very relevant is that I'm preparing a commercial product, and as such it comes with a major amount of extra baggage in many respects. For example, with lot of different users and environments, the chances for problems to occur increases greatly. Since each and every problem is a (negative) contact for both sides, a lot of code that would be 'okay' for an in-house operation must be extra bullet-proof; diagnostics gathering must anticipate many situations; maintenance must be automated, and so on, and on. Bill > John [excessive quoting removed by server] _______________________________________________ Post Messages to: ProFox@leafe.com Subscription Maintenance: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profox OT-free version of this list: http://leafe.com/mailman/listinfo/profoxtech ** All postings, unless explicitly stated otherwise, are the opinions of the author, and do not constitute legal or medical advice. This statement is added to the messages for those lawyers who are too stupid to see the obvious.
