Debug

Deleting entries is harder than it looks.  Definitely need to have an "Are you sure you want to permanently delete this entry" dialog.  I'm nearly ready to do the Alpha release on SourceForge, Chronicle version 0.2.  Everything's still bare metal, you can't change the config and theme files except by manually editing them, but it works.

34 source files, 6 sub packages, 29 support files.  VB projects never got this big, but they did require about 3MB of support DLLs.  The smallest program needed 4 install floppy disks.

Investigative debugging is so much easier when you can use an Integrated Development Environment (IDE) and step through each statement in turn, noting what each variable is at that moment.  Unless you've got something like Visual Cafe you have to litter the code with System.out.println statements.

Bizarre.  Adding two lines of code AFTER the line that was failing fixed the problem.  That doesn't feel logical to me.

Chronicle's Alpha release, titled Winter, is up on SourceForge.  Someone is monitoring the binary files release package, someone's interested!  And I've emailed the guy in Cuba to let him know it's ready for use too.  He only wanted a diary, so this release is all he needs.  Next thing to do is the publishing.  Changing the settings with a pretty GUI can wait until after it's functional as a blog program.  Paul wants it to publish indexed by titles instead of dates.  I guess a macro would do that.

There were 45 downloads of Chronicle's v0.11 binary release, 28 of its v0.11 source release.  They weren't all me and Paul testing.  Someone out there is watching.

A lot of projects on SourceForge never get around to releasing any files.  I just jumped a major hurdle and hit the Alpha stage, after going through Planning and Pre-Alpha.  Pre-Alpha is basically "install at your own risk,"  because it may or may not work/delete stuff at random/kill your computer.  Alpha code is shaky but definitely taking getting there, like a Microsoft version 1.0 product.  Beta One is the next major landmark, commercial software companies sometimes release them for testing.  Then it's downhill to Beta Two, then Gold Code, or Production/Stable, the big version 1.0 release.  "Gold code" is named after the recordable gold master CDs that were given to the duplication company for the shrinkwrap version.  Recordable CDs now are a delicate sea green colour on silver.