The last month went rather badly. First I got distracted by another project for two weeks … and then when I finally got back to working on the recommender, I found a bunch of problems with the way my database code was working (or rather, not working).

Essentially, I made a mistake when I wrote the tests and mostly tested my DataSet? logic, and not the round-trip to the database, or even the individual queries to the database. Even though my unit tests were working, the data wasn’t being stored in the database right. I’ve added a few tests which actually run SQL queries against the back-end database after exercising the interface — and I’ll add a few more in the next week or so as I actually try running the scraper, but the couple that are there now will prevent duplicating the same bug again.

At any rate. I’m clearly at least three weeks behind schedule, although I expect I’ll be able to get back on track, it will be partly at the cost of leaving the SOM code in C++ for now or using an automatic converter to get most of the conversion to C# from C++. Overall, that’s not really a huge problem, as long as I can hook it in without resorting to a command-line interface.