Version 1.1 of Chef included a new feature for submitting crash reports if they happen in the wild. When one happens, the user has the option to send one in along with any comments and their email address (optional). It has always sounded like a good feature to have, but it took me some time for that to bubble up from a “nice to have” to actually being implemented.

1.1 was released in the beginning of August, but it wasn’t until the last week or so that I discovered that I had a bug in my build/setup/deploy process that didn’t include a critical dll to allow the reporting to work! So much for testing! So last week I put out a new build with the problem fixed. Whew.

This morning, sitting in my inbox was a crash report from a gentleman who tried to install Chef but it threw an error during the database install/configuration. This is one area I know I’ve had problems with in the past, and thought I had nailed down with the exception of some case my dad runs into when he tries to install it on his laptop. Multiple times he’s gotten the error. Well, thankfully, due to the crash report I believe I have found the problem and fixed it! Yay! The new build is uploading as we speak.

The dilemma is over, thanks to a few suggestions from David.

Here’s the result:

I need your help.

I’m implementing something in Chef and cannot come up with a good term for it. It’s the ability to scale a recipe (double, triple, halve, etc.). I have it implemented in such a way that you basically get a temporary, non-editable, non-savable version of the recipe with the amounts changed as desired.

Before implementing it, I referred to them as Scaled Recipes, but now that the framework is in place for more such temporary modifications I’ve taken to referring to them as Virtual Recipes. I think that would confuse some people, am I right? Do any of you have any other suggestions? If so, please leave comments or email me (ej@ejinnovations.com).

Ladies and gentlemen, I present to you Chef Version 1.1.   Download the full version here, but if you’re a current user, you can download a much smaller upgrade now!

Enjoy!

With just a few hours remaining in July, I’m happy to report that this month saw my first several sales of Chef. It’s interesting how that very first sale made me feel – just a couple days prior I had been asked by a few people if I had sold any. At that time, it had been released for right around 3 months and I’d had not a single sale. I almost felt embarrassed to respond with the “0″, I think because of how much work I’ve put into the software and maybe I was just being silly to think that I could make a little money with it. Thankfully I may not be silly to think that after all.

July also saw my first real support incident with it, one that was a little hairy but which I got resolved in a little over two evenings. It resulted in a new build, off of my 1.0 branch which forced me to make some changes (for the better) to my build system to allow building multiple code lines. This also allowed me to use Perforce’s integration capabilities to automatically merge this bugfix into the mainline – my first dealings with this in Perforce.

As I type this, I’m running an RC build of sorts for version 1.1 which I plan on releasing later this week. I’ll get it installed on our Chef PC and run a few more tests before calling it good. Look for it on Friday morning!