{"id":216,"date":"2007-06-05T15:50:25","date_gmt":"2007-06-05T20:50:25","guid":{"rendered":"\/cgi\/wp\/?p=216"},"modified":"2019-12-10T08:34:17","modified_gmt":"2019-12-10T13:34:17","slug":"things-that-are-consuming-my-time","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/?p=216","title":{"rendered":"Things That Are Consuming My Time"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><span>I&#8217;ve been very busy the past few months and can&#8217;t seem to make much progress in getting things done to reduce my work load. Therefore a blog is in order to explain why. First, the <strong>USPS<\/strong> changed their shipping rates and broke the web service that provides International Shipping Rates. This is a problem for many e-commerce shopping carts including Storefront 6.0. I have developed a VBScript to test the USPS shipping API without using Storefront so I can determine exactly what the XML requests and responses are. Storefront does not provide a clue as to why the attempt to get the shipping rate fails. Unfortunately I am still unable to resolve this problem because USPS is not documenting their web services very well.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>I&#8217;ve also been using <strong>Visual Studio 2005<\/strong> a lot more now so it has been necessary for me to learn all the new features. I spent a lot of time learning the various debugging options and documented many obscure features. I still use <strong>Visual Studio 2003<\/strong> for many ASP.NET 1.1 projects so I&#8217;ve also expanded my knowledge of Visual Studio 2003. I&#8217;m a real power user of Visual Studio now!<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>In addition to Visual Studio 2005, I&#8217;ve been studying <strong>C#<\/strong>. Many of the programming tasks that I know how to do in <strong>VB.NET<\/strong> have had to be translated into C#. Sometimes I learn how to do something in C# and then need to translate it into VB.NET. And sometimes I need to figure out how to do something in NET 1.1 that I&#8217;ve learned how to do in NET 2.0. So I&#8217;ve been kept busy juggling two programming languages and two application framework versions! I would like to convert all my ASP.NET 1.1 projects into ASP.NET 2.0 and reduce my use of Visual Studio 2003. Unfortunately, this requires a time consuming upgrade of Storefront 6.0.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>I recently bought California Software&#8217;s <strong>BABY\/400<\/strong> to help me learn <strong>RPG<\/strong>. Unfortunately, the BABY\/400 operating system emulator is pretty rare now and there is virtually no documentation on it to be found on the Internet. I have to struggle to figure out how to do the simplest things. It takes hours of trial and error. I have not even managed to run a RPG program yet.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>I hope to decrease the pace of my studying as I gain more skill with Visual Studio 2005, C# and RPG. I&#8217;ve pretty much exhausted the Visual Studio 2005 subject and C# only occasionally requires some additional study now. I still need to spend a lot more time on BABY\/400 and RPG but I&#8217;ve made considerable progress in that area.<\/span><\/p>\n<p><span>This blog is now getting over 600 SPAM comments a day! The spammers have really ruined text blogging. I waste a lot of time deleting email notifications of spam comments so I have turned that off. If you want to leave a legitimate comment on my blog you should email me so I can find your comment to approve it. <\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I&#8217;ve been very busy the past few months and can&#8217;t seem to make much progress in getting things done to reduce my work load. Therefore a blog is in order to explain why. First, the USPS changed their shipping rates &hellip; <a href=\"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/?p=216\">Continue reading <span class=\"meta-nav\">&rarr;<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=216"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3264,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/216\/revisions\/3264"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/williamsportwebdeveloper.com\/cgi\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}