Midterm evaluations for summer of code students

[Maarten Lankhorst]

Hi students,

As you might know it's time for midterm evaluations. Unfortunately for
some students I haven't seen the progress they made, and I highly
encourage all students to send their patches early and often, even if
it's not yet finished.

Also, I would like to hear from all students now a reflection. What
went well, and what didn't, and what did you accomplish so far? :-)

Cheers,
Maarten.

[RazZziel]

I've been cleaning my patches, thanks to the infinite patience of Kai,
and I'm starting to send them right now. However my progress can be
tracked in http://repo.or.cz/w/wine/gsoc_dplay.git

The main problem so far was to adapt my workflow to an style I've
never worked with, and to realize I still have too much to learn :P

My first milestone is mostly accomplished: most tests are done, but
the implementation is less improved than I expected. I only commited
some trivial patches, but at least I started understanding what is
done and what has to be done (which should have been done when writing
my application and schedule, but, well.)
I'm facing some problems understanding the current dplay codebase, but
it's probably I feel overwhelmed all this new COM platform, unknown to
me, and with some effort it's not so complex.

Summing up, I still have to (stop slacking and) study a lot before
doing anything really productive.

Regards
Ismael

On 7/8/08, Maarten Lankhorst  wrote:
> Hi students,
>
> As you might know it's time for midterm evaluations. Unfortunately for
> some students I haven't seen the progress they made, and I highly
> encourage all students to send their patches early and often, even if
> it's not yet finished.
>
> Also, I would like to hear from all students now a reflection. What
> went well, and what didn't, and what did you accomplish so far? :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Maarten.

[Adam Petaccia]

On Mon, 2008-07-07 at 14:39 -0700, Maarten Lankhorst wrote:
> Hi students,
>
> As you might know it's time for midterm evaluations. Unfortunately for
> some students I haven't seen the progress they made, and I highly
> encourage all students to send their patches early and often, even if
> it's not yet finished.
>
> Also, I would like to hear from all students now a reflection. What
> went well, and what didn't, and what did you accomplish so far? :-)

So far I've accomplished a great amount of text handling functions
(FontFamilies, FontCollections, and StringFormat) (which I need to clean
up before sending) in GDI+, and I expect to have those finished by next
week (putting me a week behind where I want to be), but I'm also working
on GpRegion handling now (as oddly enough, a few StringFormat functions
need it).

For what hasn't gone so well, I still need work on focusing on
_one_or_two_ sub-projects at once (mild ADD at work) - as a bunch of
half finished projects don't help too much. The other is sticking closer
to test-driven development. I've often found myself caught up on why my
code doesn't make some app work, and it becomes clear once a simple
testcase is written (or at least clear what isn't the problem).

This has been a very rewarding and empowering experience, and I look
forward to contributing to Wine after Summer of Code is finished.

[Owen Rudge]

> Also, I would like to hear from all students now a reflection. What
> went well, and what didn't, and what did you accomplish so far? :-)

My project so far has gone fairly well, and I'd say I'm currently just a 
little ahead of schedule, which I'm pleased about. The first part of the 
project was to get the Control Panel working in the shell namespace, and it 
turned out that a lot of the work had already been done, it just wasn't 
glued together properly. It took me a little while to figure out what needed 
doing, but I managed to work it out and it made it into Wine 1.1. :-) I'm 
now moving onto developing some new control panel applets, and looking at 
ways to improve winecfg. I've been working on an Add/Remove Programs applet 
for the past week or so, which is now more or less complete, and will likely 
be submitted to wine-patches soon. I'm also thinking about what I'm going to 
do with winecfg, with my thinking that the bits that are not configurable on 
a per-application basis (desktop appearance and sound, mainly) can be moved 
into/reimplemented in new control panels. So that'll be my main focus over 
the next few weeks.

The biggest challenge for me now is probably working out a "work plan", and 
making sure I set targets for myself, to ensure I can try to get as much 
done and use my time efficiently. Other than that, I've learned a lot about 
the general process of Wine development, and have quite enjoyed things so 
far.

The majority of my code can be found at 
http://repo.or.cz/w/wine/gsoc_cpanel.git.

Cheers,

[Piotr Caban]

Hello,

On Monday 07 of July 2008 23:39:25 Maarten Lankhorst wrote:
> Also, I would like to hear from all students now a reflection. What
> went well, and what didn't, and what did you accomplish so far? :-)

I've been working on two parts of my MSXML projects:
1) Fixing bugs
That went well. I have fixed Photoshop CS3 installer as well as other bugs. I 
have patches for bugs 5565, 8945, 9349, 9604, 10802, 11301, 11376, 12521, 
14386, 14260 and 5074. I have also investigated most of bugs in msxml3 
component.
2) Implementing SAX reader.
I have started working on it and written some code, but it still needs more 
work.
I have also done some work towards asynchronous reading.

The hardest thing for me was debugging Photoshop CS3 installer. It was easy to 
find missing APIs that I had to implement, but the last problem was very hard 
to find (and it's that more satisfaction from fixing it:-) ).

Regards,
    Piotr

[Dylan Smith]

On Mon, Jul 7, 2008 at 5:39 PM, Maarten Lankhorst 
wrote:
> Hi students,
>
> As you might know it's time for midterm evaluations. Unfortunately for
> some students I haven't seen the progress they made, and I highly
> encourage all students to send their patches early and often, even if
> it's not yet finished.
>
> Also, I would like to hear from all students now a reflection. What
> went well, and what didn't, and what did you accomplish so far? :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Maarten.

I have done well in getting used to the richedit code, and have managed to
send plenty of bug fixes which show this fact.

The main task that I have been working towards has been implementing tables
in richedit controls.  The main difficulty in this was redesigning the code
to support nesting multiple paragraphs in a cell, and nesting tables within
tables.  I have ended up changing my design choices a few times which has
slowed me down, but I still think I am on track to finishing this task since
I have made enough progress.

I am definitely finding this to be a rewarding experience, and I have
learning a lot through this summer.

[Gal Topper]

Hi, and sorry for missing this mail and responding late,

My project to implement PrintDlgEx() has been going well in that I've
implemented everything but the custom property pages feature (and ANSI
support). Therefore, at this point, my main challenge is to implement
this feature and to ensure good code quality, which turned out to be
harder than expected due to the state of reused code from PrintDlg() -
although this latter challenge is mostly resolved now.

Overall, I've found this SoC to be a great experience. I've certainly
learnt a lot about win32 and Wine, and it was well worth the effort.

Cheers,
Gal

On Tue, Jul 8, 2008 at 12:39 AM, Maarten Lankhorst
 wrote:
> Hi students,
>
> As you might know it's time for midterm evaluations. Unfortunately for
> some students I haven't seen the progress they made, and I highly
> encourage all students to send their patches early and often, even if
> it's not yet finished.
>
> Also, I would like to hear from all students now a reflection. What
> went well, and what didn't, and what did you accomplish so far? :-)
>
> Cheers,
> Maarten.