OMG!!!!

Right after we got our code working!! We were sooo excited!

Today was the best day at work! For the past few days we have been trying to tackle the problem of how exactly we were going to send a text message from our gadget to someone's phone. It seemed like such a complex problem, and probably would have been if we hadn't discovered what we figured out today. The way we were approaching the problem was by implementing an API that would send an email message through something called exchange web services. The problem was, we didn't always have the URL to get to this EWS(exchange web services) server. Also, the way we would send info was through calls called SOAP calls that act as an envelope in sending a letter. They package the information being sent and contain the information on who is receiving it. We created these soap calls by auto-generating a proxy, which turned out to be these long pages of code that were so hard to work with. So, after talking with many people, we were put in contact with a PM who works with the Exchange Web Services. Turns out, he created an API (that won't be released until the newest version of exchange and is therefore not documented yet) that sends information. It gets the URL through auto-discovery all without using a proxy. We were FREAKING OUT when he told us this. We had been talking with devs trying to figure out how all this was going to work, and in a few hours were introduced to the perfect API that does exactly what we need, and can now send texts from our program containing maybe 20 lines of code. It was sooooo amazing!!!! There is still a lot of work, because I now have to change up my feature a little to be able to store the credentials the user with log on with in a secure way so the gadget doesnt actually have to stay connected to the server constantly, and still not make the user sign in multiple times. Also, we have a lot of testing to do, plenty of priority 2 features to implement if we want, and tons of UI (user interface...the way the gadget looks) work to do. But we finally made it down probably one of the biggest hills put in front of us, and hopefully it will be relatively smooth sailing from here. Our managers jokes that now we figured this out, we need to start another gadget. But so after a pretty stressful week of staring at code and wondering what the heck we were going to do, we made intense progress, and now have tons of breathing room. YAY!!!