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, embarrasing 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.
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I encountered one once that amused me so much I taped a screenshot of it on my office door. It consisted of nothing but an exclamation point icon and the two words:
"Catastrophic Failure"
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Well, it can't be clearer, Everything is wrong! time to run like a headless chicken!
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My favourite from Microsoft has to be
"There has been an error"
I've also seen reports of one thats just a blank dialog box without even an OK button to make it go away!
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I once got an error message from a 3rd party component:
"Don't know what to do"
Seriously?!
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This is easy. I am staring at (VB.NET):
A call to PInvoke function 'exam123-DB!exam123.Exam123F::Sleep' has unbalanced the stack. This is likely because the managed PInvoke signature does not match the unmanaged target signature. Check that the calling convention and parameters of the PInvoke signature match the target unmanaged signature.
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That's a perfectly reasonable error message:
- It's aimed at developers, so it can assume you'll know, or be able to find out, what managed, unmanaged and PInvoke mean;
- It tells you what's wrong; (your PInvoke method signature)
- It tells you where the problem is; (the import of exam123-DB!exam123.Exam123F::Sleep)
- It tells you how to fix it; (correct the signature)
It can't do much more for you, since unmanaged methods don't have enough metadata for the compiler to tell you what the correct signature should be.
"These people looked deep within my soul and assigned me a number based on the order in which I joined."
- Homer
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Biggest error I ever seen is "Your Windows is successfully installed". Yes, it was MY fault. )
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Have you considered fixing yourself?
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Tried many times - with OS/2, Linux, FreeBSD, QNX... hell knows how I hate ugly Windows but still have to use it. Now I'm developer, hooked on .NET;
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