Monday, November 28, 2005
bugz...
ok, so, something you all should know about computer programmers is that we HATE it when things don't work the way the documentation says they should work. Only slightly less hate-worthy is when things don't work the way any reasonable person would expect them to. (sometimes the documentation says that it doesn't work in a reasonable way, which is even more infuriating - imagine reading a cake recipethat said something along the lines of "... and then mix it all up and throw it in the over for 20 minutes at 350 deg. - it won't work and the cake will taste awful, but that's our best advice.")
Anyway, I spent the ENTIRE day today, dealing with bugs in other people's stuff. Not other people I work with, but in the products I work with. Ie: .NET.
The first was a bug I deal with on an ongoing basis, and it has to do with the Visual Studio Forms Designer. It erases/changes code on you sometimes. There's no way to detect it ahead of time, and there's no easy way to know that the reason things don't work anymore is realated to the Forms Designer (though that's always a good place to start).
The second thing was a bug (I'm calling it a bug. It's documented, so I guess that makes it a 'feature' but I think it's down right stupid) in a forms control called a "ListView". If the .NET team had just spent 6 more hours on this thing (the time it took me to implement the behaviour I wanted, manually), .NET programmers the world over would be saved this aggravation and this (what I will consider) wasted time. It's maddening sometimes.
Now, I'm an inexperienced programmer, and I don't know what other frameworks are like. Maybe things are better in the Java world, or on Mac OS X (would that surprise me?). On the whole I'm actually VERY pleased with .NET. I love it for most of my programming, but then something completley hair-brained like this comes up and I just get so frustrated with it...
Anyway, I spent the ENTIRE day today, dealing with bugs in other people's stuff. Not other people I work with, but in the products I work with. Ie: .NET.
The first was a bug I deal with on an ongoing basis, and it has to do with the Visual Studio Forms Designer. It erases/changes code on you sometimes. There's no way to detect it ahead of time, and there's no easy way to know that the reason things don't work anymore is realated to the Forms Designer (though that's always a good place to start).
The second thing was a bug (I'm calling it a bug. It's documented, so I guess that makes it a 'feature' but I think it's down right stupid) in a forms control called a "ListView". If the .NET team had just spent 6 more hours on this thing (the time it took me to implement the behaviour I wanted, manually), .NET programmers the world over would be saved this aggravation and this (what I will consider) wasted time. It's maddening sometimes.
Now, I'm an inexperienced programmer, and I don't know what other frameworks are like. Maybe things are better in the Java world, or on Mac OS X (would that surprise me?). On the whole I'm actually VERY pleased with .NET. I love it for most of my programming, but then something completley hair-brained like this comes up and I just get so frustrated with it...
