#100DaysOfCode - Day 11: Development Lessons (don't be afraid to update)

Happy Monday everyone! Today, I battled (and finally defeated) an issue with Visual Studio that I’ve been running into for quite some time. It was one of those issues that was definitely humbling, and made me realize how novice of a developer I still am. I’m still relatively rusty with Visual Studio, and haven’t done very much to push updates to old packages, because, well, all the development I’d done at my previous employer with .NET has been in net new applications

NOTE: don’t be shy with updating in software development - whilst “bleeding edge” can be damaging in certain domains, it’s definitely the inverse case with keeping up-to-date on stable releases).

In any case, today, I finally got my act together in removing a Microsoft officially supported library, to test whether that was the application actually breaking outbound requests on the application side, and well, it was.

I, quite stupidly, kept putting off removing a package, because it was something that was very cryptic to me (the use case to me isn’t clear), I was worried about bizarre consequences for deleting it, and most of all, I had it working in a very rare circumstance last week that I was so stubborn in trying to reproduce to get it to work… so yeah, save your time and don’t be stubborn.

When I finally ripped the bandaid off, and the local code was FINALLY working again - I was SO happy. After that successful test, I had the confidence needed to move forward with a fresh install of the application, with a much newer version that supported the functionality we needed. Of course, there’s still other real work to be done, but it’s still a still in the right direction.

Thanks for reading!

~ Moxnr