Today I had one of those “Argh! Why have I been so stupid *slaps forehead*” moments which is so typical to people in the programming field. I finaly managed to solve a problem that has been bugging me at work for the last 4 weeks, and the solution was simple and made me feel extremely stupid for overlooking it. In short – if you ever need to use the GDI+ library, REMEMBER THAT YOU HAVE TO CALL GdiplusStartup() BEFORE USING ANY OF THE CLASSES IN IT. Forgetting to do such a simple thing cost me at least 4 full days of pure agony, trying to figure out why a simple class instantiation kept returning NULL pointers. (Ok, I promise that’s as technical as I’ll ever get on my blog)
However, it only hit me today that one of the biggest differences between programming in school and programming in the real world is that I cannot just give up on a programming problem I’m stuck at and expect just to have to swallow losing a few points on a project. In the real world, being stuck at something raises the possibillity of the entire project getting stalled till the problem is resolved. I guess the seriousness of the work which I’m doing is finally slowly dawning on me. I’m surprised that its taking so long, perhaps its the laid back culture at MS which contributes to such a slow descent into reality.
Posted by kelxia 
