Q: When is a BUG not a "BUG"?

A: When it's by design.

If you are a denizen of the forums (I have no choice, I help run ours at eggheadcafe.com) --and the newsgroups, you learn a lot from reading posts.. Of 100 posts indignantly claiming to have found "A BUG" in the .NET Framework, there is rarely more than one that can lay claim to have found a legitimate bug, and usually, if they do, it's one that has already been covered 100 times over via newsgroup posts and KB Articles, had they only taken the time to search first.

I say this once again because I just received an unsolicited email from somebody who had posted his newly found "BUG" at the LadyBug site asking me to vote for it! Good God, it was simply a minor variant of the fact that if you import XML into a DataSet either in the designer or via ReadXml and it has repeating nodes with the same name, the DataSet can't parse it because it would create duplicate table names. Same thing with nested relations.

Er, that's not a bug - its a good thing!

The guy even quoted text from a post I had made some time ago with my suggestions, apparently believing that reminding me what I wrote six months ago would support my remembering the rationale to "vote" for his bug submission:

Peter Bromberg [C# MVP] wrote:
> The dataSet is doing its best to infer a schema when reading your Xml
> document, and it's finding two sets of elements with the same name,
> and doesn't know how to handle it.

> Experiment if you can with changing the name of one of the sets of
> elements and the error will go away.
> This is very common when reading Xml that doesn't correspond to the
> expected Schema for a DataSet.
> --Peter


What am I talking, Greek? Doods, if you think you've found "a bug", please do some research first. It's usually a bug of the genus userstupidius.

Real bugs in the .NET Framework are extremely difficult to find, and they usually ARE NOT found by the type of developer who posts "I found a BUG in...." to newsgroups.

This post has been brought to you by the letters B, U and ... G.

Comments

  1. Anonymous12:26 AM

    Peter,
    We're considering C# for a client proxy server we're building. I am trying to find accurate .Net client penetration data before we make the decision.

    I'm looking for the following:
    - % of Windows clients now have .Net 1.1 or later installed.
    - What OS did .Net first appear in, preinstalled
    - Does .Net come with IE and if so, starting at what version of IE
    - If you write in .Net 1.1, will that code excute error free in 2.0, and vice-versa, can 2.0 .Net execute in 1.1 framework (obviously assuming you use classes that are avail in 1.1)?

    Can you help me find out? it's been achallenge to get good answers, maybe i'm not looking in the right locations for the data. It seems like such a critical question that it should be easy to find on MS' site...

    Thanks
    Scott Milener
    CEO
    Browster, Inc
    milener@browster.com
    www.browster.com
    415-726-3036

    ReplyDelete
  2. peterbromberg6:36 AM

    I believe Windows XP SP 2 is the first OS where .NET 1.1 is preinstalled. I've seen a survey that indicated some 46% of the Fortune 1000 companies use .NET. Aside from that I'm afraid you are either on your own, or perhaps someone more informed can post a comment of their own.

    ReplyDelete
  3. Robbe Morris8:27 AM

    .NET is not part of or related to IE.

    .NET 2.0 has features that 1.1 does not have. The source code for
    1.1 can be recompiled to run under 2.0.

    I've been using .NET for production apps since 2001. It has been and continues to be fantastic.

    Each version of the framework is largely automonous at runtime. They are not overwrites as part of the upgrade. You can run multiple versions of the runtime on the same machine (and most people do).

    .NET is definitely an enterprise solution and ranks up there (if not better) than Java in regards to usage.

    The .NET 2.0 framework is solid. Visual Studio .NET 2005 is a little buggy and slow but not enough to stop you from writing great apps.

    If you are getting into .NET, 2.0 is definitely the way to go. The new features such as generics and anonymous methods allow you to do some cool things with your OOP design.

    ReplyDelete
  4. Anonymous9:43 PM

    I found this insightful.

    ReplyDelete
  5. Anonymous12:07 AM

    >> If you write in .Net 1.1, will that code excute error free in 2.0?

    On the whole, yes. I am aware of some 1.0/1.1 code that acts differently in 2.0, but its fairly rare.

    Here is an example:

    http://lab.msdn.microsoft.com/productfeedback/viewfeedback.aspx?feedbackid=be9d334d-152f-4689-b8c4-87c11b7115b5

    ReplyDelete

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