Designer Jeans?

I was challenged today to make a post about designer jeans, and relate it to programming, which is somewhat daunting.

I ventured into the SB forums and was a bit surprised to see the posts I found there. I guess everyone is not as aware of the absolute volume of work put into this program and its ancillaries, a project reaching almost 100,000 lines of code, and maintained by one man. Daunting to take over, daunting to step into the light of expectation from the current userbase of SB3.

Of course, Joel has done most of the work. As he's mentioned before, the program is, for the most part, done. Portions have been in testing with a beta team, and a good amount of the core development has been checked off.

So what's the delay? Well, for starters, what has been said on the forum is true. I am coming in dark to this all. There is an awful lot to learn, and I've been taking it all in as fast as possible. I am in no way starting over, and the project is not getting abandoned. For those of you who don't use SB, there are several "code trees" at work here. There are internal (module) and external (exe) versions, both of these working on either FSUIPC or SimConnect, and the FSUIPC versions having elements for FS8 and FS9, which continue to be supported. Most of this is done. Let me clarify ahead of time what I mean by "done", and that is: the program elements are working in test situations. This is not the same done as in "If it's done, why not package up what you have and release it while you keep working on new stuff?" done. It's not there, and I don't think Joel or I would want to put that sort of statement of quality on our work anyways.

So what's left is that I'm now writing the module portion for FSX, and progressing along nicely. Once that is done, which includes loading the module at launch, establishing a connection through SimConnect, activating the menu item in the sim and handling the loading of the internal program window when you use said menu item, then there is the matter of testing all of it, which I believe Joel already has a good mechanism in place for, as well as going through the whole codebase and updating everything to the latest version specs, cleaning stuff up, some more testing, some more cleaning, packaging it up and getting it on its merry way.

Really, I would have loved to have had something for Christmas or New Years, but I had to selfishly go and get engaged.

But Joel and I have talked a lot about this and I'm in it for the long-haul. I'm very excited to see where SB and Flight Sim go after this version.

So much for combining this with designer jeans.

Squawkbox

For those of you who don't know, I've come on board as a developer on the Squawkbox project. Fellow flight sim dev Joel DeYoung has been working on SB for a while, and the app is the main method for connecting to the VATSIM network.

I'm very excited about the opportunity and I look forward to posting about our progress. Not only that, but it now gives me a good chance to get on VATSIM more and really experience that incredible online community.