Gruntled n' Combobulated

The Duke Health Technology Solutions has offered me a full time position and I have decided to accept! This is a marvelous step forward and I'm very excited to join the team. It does mean that I'll have to pass off my current project to another contractor as I'll be shifting my job responsibilities, but I'm confident that the codebase is well commented and clean enough that it should be relatively easy for another software engineer to pick up where I'm leaving off. It's been a very interesting transition. The work environment here is much different than what I experienced at Microsoft. Here, the expectations and pressures seems to be much more reasonable whereas at Microsoft I would have been in dire straits if I did not work at least 50 hours a week. This could partly be my aptitude, but I think that everyone in the local office worked at least that much so I certainly wasn't alone. At Duke, while there will still be pressures of deadlines and deliver...

As part of my latest updates to my current project, I made a change to the underlying WCF service that provides much of the information to our Silverlight application. In one of my DataContract classes, I started passing a child class to one of its DataMembers (i.e. the DataMember is a property on Foo, I passed in a Bar which is a subclass of Foo). Then, when Silverlight called the asynchronous version of that method, I started getting an ambiguous error: "The remote server returned an error: NotFound" I stepped through both the Silverlight side and my WCF side - no errors apparent either place. However, just after the return statement in WCF and method exit, the Silverlight's service reference would pop up the "NotFound" error. Strange, I thought... what's the problem? Other web searched seemed to direct me to update the buffer size, to delete and re-add the service reference, all to no avail. Finally, I changed the type on my datacontract's datamem...

On February 9th, I will be starting my new position at Duke Hospital. I will be updating the software that provides the doctors a summary page view of a patient's vitals, recent lab results, and other crucial information with the option to "zoom in" on a given dataset or increase the timespace to twenty four hours, or three months, etc. This is a crucial application that helps doctors and other healthcare professionals save lives and increase quality of life for their patients. I am proud that I will be part of this team of two contractors with one mentor from the regular IT staff. At the same time, it's bittersweet leaving Microsoft in the middle of a product release cycle. There were so many more tasks to complete and improvements to make that now may be left incomplete as my team is down on pair of hands. I'm sure they'll get by, but I will miss them. Changing jobs is never easy. I hope in this blog to track my path toward a gruntled and combobulated p...