AllSoftwareComica

Comica Database Update

Oh my, no update for a few days? It's the end times!

Nah, nah; I just didn't work on anything of note to write about. Already, a lot of the stuff I blog about I would never have previously done as they're not what I'd call "major", or even exciting. But I'm making myself talk about them anyway as it keeps content coming, so don't go thinking I'm thinking that I'm working on major works of art or anything - it's just more kahnent to babble about.

Alright, Comica. Not much to report on this other than I pushed a database update out for the first time in a while. Or, at least tried to.

I received a "Comic not working" notification (a feature I built into Comica that allows users to notify me of knackered comics) and thought, "Eh - why not?". I then ran a "deep validation" within the Comica Editor to weedle out any obviously broken comics while I was fixing up the reported comic.

Thirty minutes later (yes, it takes a while to manually go through the comics that the Editor says is broken; this is why I don't do full updates often, especially as I could be working on my commercial software instead), all fixed. Hit Upload and... nothing. The little console app that does the actual uploading appeared and then immediately disappeared. Uh-oh.

Loaded up the source and, oh, I should probably upgrade all of the projects to .Net 4.7. Did that and realised the configurations (x86, x64) were all over the place; there were even Itanium configs in there for some reason. Cleaned it all up.

Stuck a break point in the uploader source and immediately found the problem: the computer name it was expecting was different, so it bailed out.

When I created the Database Uploader console app, I put a quick 'n dirty check in there to ensure that it only runs on my PC. Turns out I hadn't changed the name of the PC when I installed Windows a couple of months back.

Fixed that and everything ran as before.

This got me thinking about doing a bit of work on the "next generation" of Comica (the editor is really nice!) - except it would have to be free, and then the thinking stopped right there. Ya can't live on free, son.