Disappearing act

An interesting weekend looms ahead. Yesterday, a client called our sales guy who then called our boss's boss who then called our boss who called our project leader who called us. They were having some issues with some piece of software we sent them. Really weird stuff, the application was experiencing auto-close syndrome. What happens is you could be doing some very very normal action and the application just disappears without warning. No exception, no message, nada.

The application communicates with a serial device through COM port and uses some old VB6 components through Interop. The serial communication is using Win32 API through Interop as well. From observation and multiple testing, the occurence appears to be linked to it's serial device communication. Everytime I do something to the application which causes it to refresh the screen at high rates eg dragging a window on top of the main application window very very fast, the COM port appears to get flooded. After a short while, the application just disappears. It's not even in the process list. =( I've searched high and low, thorough and thorough and I
can't find any information on this. I wonder if my search phrases are inaccurate? Hmm...

I found some articles hinting at Interop not being so user friendly however there was no clear label on the packaging stating 'Use with care. Functionality NOT guaranteed'. Anyone out there has an extra helping hand or ten to lend?

Time to work on this, so ciao.

Coder != Developer

What is developing software? I use to think that developing software means churning out chunks of code that works. Those were the days when I use to code using Notepad. ;-)
The other day I was at a bookshop browsing and I found this book titled 'Coder to Developer'. I browsed through it and it sounded pretty useful especially for someone like me doing a spot of soul searching, trying to find my path in the wild wild west of computers and such.
However, it's been almost two weeks since I bought it and I still haven't started on it. =p Was too busy doing some de-lousing of a piece of software followed by some in-house training at my company. The training was more like knowledge sharing among my colleagues unfortunately the titled assigned to me was something I thought I knew and understood, but turned out during the presentation there was much much more I didn't know.
The interesting title is 'Event-driven Programming'. I thought, "Event-driven programming, hmm.. piece of cake. You throw events from A and then you catch and react to the event in B". The very first thing I found out was event programming in VB.NET does not appear to be multithreaded. Interesting interesting interesting. Too bad I got chewed up by everyone =(. Still it was a good lesson for me - Never to go into a presentation without sufficient research. ;-)
Training commences again now. More rantings later. =D

The Beginning

First there was light. Then came sound. A buzzing sound of sorts. After that, the light grew brighter and brighter. Then came somemore sounds. Finally, the computer was turned on.

The end.