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The Weird and The Wonderful

   

The Weird and The Wonderful forum is a place to post Coding Horrors, Worst Practices, and the occasional flash of brilliance.

We all come across code that simply boggles the mind. Lazy kludges, embarrassing mistakes, horrid workarounds and developers just not quite getting it. And then somedays we come across - or write - the truly sublime.

Post your Best, your worst, and your most interesting. But please - no programming questions . This forum is purely for amusement and discussions on code snippets. All actual programming questions will be removed.

 
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
Mohammed Hameed17-Jul-13 20:03
professionalMohammed Hameed17-Jul-13 20:03 
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
Brady Kelly17-Jul-13 23:39
Brady Kelly17-Jul-13 23:39 
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
Nicholas Marty17-Jul-13 23:44
professionalNicholas Marty17-Jul-13 23:44 
JokeRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
Paulo_JCG17-Jul-13 22:39
professionalPaulo_JCG17-Jul-13 22:39 
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
ScottM117-Jul-13 23:07
ScottM117-Jul-13 23:07 
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
GenJerDan18-Jul-13 3:17
GenJerDan18-Jul-13 3:17 
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
MSBassSinger18-Jul-13 4:11
professionalMSBassSinger18-Jul-13 4:11 
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
dojohansen18-Jul-13 5:36
dojohansen18-Jul-13 5:36 
MS' standard approach to everything these days seems to be to make something that sometimes works and can possibly be made to work eventually, with luck. Nobody seems to give a damn if anything is *correct*. Your particular story sounds like a corrupted build cache. Ever noticed the "clean" menu item? That is specifically for working around when VS has messed up it's caches and make sure everything gets made from scratch.

Granted, having a build cache does help a lot with build speed in many cases, as VS sometimes manages to correctly work out what has changed and must be rebuilt, and what hasn't and can be taken from the cache. I'll also grant that it may not be completely trivial to ensure the cache status is always correct, given that you may change files in all sorts of ways besides within VS, and given that build actions nowadays may encompass all sorts of things besides just compiling some code (e.g. code generators often execute immediately prior to build).

Even so, it does amaze me how VS sometimes manages to mess it up all by itself. The simplest solution consisting of a single console application project with a single Program.cs file and doing absolutely nothing outside of VS may still cause it to stubmle. But this sort of thing is perfectly in tune with how VS behaves in other respects. It can't modify a file because "another process" is using it, and it turns out it's VS blocking VS. It confidently asserts "all files are up to date" when solution explorer shows a folder with hundreds of files, and your working folder is empty. And for most of these, what do they do? Fix it, so VS behaves correctly? Oh no. They add a special menu option and name stuff so it seems as if YOU are at fault rather than VS. I chuckle whenever I need "get special version" in order to get the latest version and the dialog offers me the choice to fetch files even when the local version matches the specified version. Now what could *possibly* be the point of spending time to replace a file with an identical file? Clearly, MS knew full well about the problem, but was too embarrassed to honestly state "get file even if VS believes it already has it, as it sometimes mistakenly thinks so"....

I'm sure others could add many other examples of this general pattern of sketchy workarounds on top of semi-working base functionality. At least the glory days of VSS have passed - some people lost their entire source history due to it's tendency to occasionally corrupt it's own database files...
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
patbob18-Jul-13 5:59
patbob18-Jul-13 5:59 
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
Dan Sutton18-Jul-13 6:37
Dan Sutton18-Jul-13 6:37 
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
RafagaX18-Jul-13 7:25
professionalRafagaX18-Jul-13 7:25 
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
Rain Dancer18-Jul-13 21:30
Rain Dancer18-Jul-13 21:30 
GeneralRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
Member 925541220-Jul-13 6:33
Member 925541220-Jul-13 6:33 
JokeRe: Epic Visual Studios "No Code" Pin
Chad3F23-Jul-13 13:53
Chad3F23-Jul-13 13:53 
GeneralSaw something strange... Pin
BotCar16-Jul-13 4:07
BotCar16-Jul-13 4:07 
GeneralRe: Saw something strange... Pin
lewax0016-Jul-13 4:16
lewax0016-Jul-13 4:16 
GeneralRe: Saw something strange... Pin
dojohansen18-Jul-13 5:41
dojohansen18-Jul-13 5:41 
GeneralRe: Saw something strange... Pin
lewax0018-Jul-13 5:56
lewax0018-Jul-13 5:56 
GeneralRe: Saw something strange... Pin
dojohansen18-Jul-13 6:15
dojohansen18-Jul-13 6:15 
GeneralRe: Saw something strange... Pin
Brisingr Aerowing16-Jul-13 4:42
professionalBrisingr Aerowing16-Jul-13 4:42 
GeneralRe: Saw something strange... Pin
vonb16-Jul-13 19:28
vonb16-Jul-13 19:28 
GeneralRe: Saw something strange... Pin
Bernhard Hiller16-Jul-13 22:10
Bernhard Hiller16-Jul-13 22:10 
GeneralRe: Saw something strange... Pin
BotCar16-Jul-13 22:25
BotCar16-Jul-13 22:25 
GeneralRe: Saw something strange... Pin
OriginalGriff17-Jul-13 0:47
mveOriginalGriff17-Jul-13 0:47 
GeneralRe: Saw something strange... Pin
vonb16-Jul-13 23:23
vonb16-Jul-13 23:23 

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