First off, thanks for your patience during last week. While Sandy and I do try to make it feel as if you've got your own personal programming staff whenever there's a problem (by maintaining reasonable response times to the best of our abilities), sometimes we fall short. Even when it's not directly our fault, the burden is still on us to get things moving again as quickly as possible.

On Tuesday of last week, there was a patch to the .NET framework (upon which GP is built) delivered by Microsoft. Suddenly, certain key bindings to global events no longer fired. For example, whenever a request for a page comes in, there is an event that is raised. One of the responsibilities of the code within that event is to determine what site to display, based upon things like sub-domain, full domain replacements, or the guild ID specified in the URL.

That's just one of the many events that were affected, and it does far more than what I listed above. Others affected were our global error handler, some session state maintenance code, and control library bindings.

This took several days to resolve. The first thing I did was roll the environment back to 6/2. Then, I had to make sure that I hadn't changed anything that could bring about the new behavior. Once that was done, I had to find all of the affected code and attempt to find alternative ways to trigger the events. Finally, I decided to essentially rewrite the core triggering and event handling system for ASP.Net. During each step of this process there were countless compilations of the code and that meant -- perhaps worst of all -- a lot of waiting and nail-biting.

We were working the entire time; Sandy was answering support tickets that she could (the ones that didn't need code changes), and I was doing all the stuff I listed above. There was a lot of coffee and missed sleep and frazzled nerves. Not looking for any sympathy; just want to assure you that this is really all we do, and we do our best to make sure that things are working as they should.

We apologize for the lack of availability for the normal stuff. Again, thank you for your patience, and thank you for choosing GuildPortal.

Yes, thanks Aaron and Sandy! I can only imagine what it takes to do all that you do to keep everything functioning with constant updates and changes happening externally to the GP-Net.

With the debuggers bugging you and the script-scrapping screams that come with the last minute code changes, one can only guess the stress you go through.

Thanks for all you do!