Plan for Tom Bampton

Fun with VS2005, and more fun with threads and IRC in TGE

Visual Studio 2005

After a month's hiatus from coding, last night I though I'd ease back into it by doing something easy. I got the VS2005 Beta 2 DVDs from MS the other day, so first job was installing that and converting projects for TGE and TSE. I also cleaned up a lot of warnings, so the IRC pack (as its now being called) compiles fairly cleanly with about 5 or so warnings. TSE compiles with a few less, but I don't remember exactly how many. All in all, switching from VC6 to VC2005 hasnt been anywhere near as painful as I thought it would be. That said, I havent tried building TinyIRC2 in it yet, and that has some fairly nasty template code. I expect more problems there :)

TinyIRC 3 / Threaded Torque / IRC Pack

... continued from this .plan

For simplicity, I'm just going to be calling this the IRC pack from now on. It's a bit of a partial misnomer but its easier to type then TI3+TGE.

After some hacking last night to get STL_fix into TGE (conditionally, defaults to disabled), I managed to delay the need to rewrite the event dispatcher. It uses STL due to lazyness, but the pollution is contained to within one file so removing the dependency is easy, it just requires finding/writing hashtable and queue templates, and I cant be bothered to sort it out right now. At least the IRC pack now builds properly in VS2005, and is debuggable (which it wasnt in the old VC6 build, which was slowing things down a lot).

Then I wrote a bunch of script code, fixed some problems in the C++ code, and then discovered that Torque crashes strangely if you try and use % as a string cat operator. Why the hell I tried to do that I dont know, but I blame being really tired and knowing far too many languages.

With that problem fixed, it was time for TI3's first real interactive outing on IRC ...



Yeh, OK, so it doesnt look like much. Some things arent working entirely properly (as was mentioned in the screenie, if you read the discussion), but on the whole its going very well. I am a lot more confident of the backend now, and as far as the IRC code goes, there are only a few bugs left to fix. So the theory goes that "all" there is left is UI and script code. Of course, an IRC client is something like 80% UI, so in reality there is quite a lot left to do.

It's a fair way off being a pack, but it's close to being a usable alpha.