Steve, who I used to work for, came over to visit this evening. For the past year I’ve been converting one of his pieces of software from C++/MFC to C#/Winforms. The program is a kind of stock management sytem with a database back end.

Following Steve’s design has been fairly straight-forward. It helps porting an application if you have not only the original source, but the person who wrote it to hand.

One part was being rather confusing, dealing with how items of stock are stored in the database and how they are related to each other. After about an hour of playing with the C++ version and Steve explaining what was going on, I managed to untangle my brain and write some notes that now make much more sense. What I thought was a hideously complex system is now somewhat simpler.

We also went up the road to a nice pub and had some nice food. I had a steak with a piece of roast chicken breast on the top, and a bowl of chips.