On Mar 5, 2009, at 03:00, Peter da Silva wrote:
If you can't tell me what files were modified, SHUT THE FUCK UP AND
DIE IN A FIRE.
Microsoft has a penchant for reporting errors in a very general
manner. In their .NET framework, there's this class called a
KeyedCollection that complains when you add an item with a key that
is already in the collection. When it does so, it fails entirely to
mention which key caused the collision. Probably some genius thought
that, since KeyedCollection is fully generic and allows all manner of
objects to be the key, it was best to err on the side of safety and
not even *try* to resolve the value of the it by applying the
ubiquitous ToString() method. It is entirely possible that, with an
arbitrary class as the key, that this would result in gobbledygook
instead of something useful, which would tarnish the koan-like
simplicity of the current error message. In the acknowledgedly rare
case that the key is a string, this would work, but who would
possibly use simple strings as key values?
With the "as few virtual methods as possible" policy found throughout
that framework, you're stuck with either (A) a useless log entry from
the customer installation or (B) combing the stack while debugging to
figure out which string was actually used as a key.
So, yeah, "DIE IN A FIRE" sums it up nicely.
--
Marco Von Ballmoos
http://earthli.com - Home of the earthli WebCore; PHP web sites made
simple.
