Maybe there's something wrong with the universe, but probably not

re: Maybe there's something wrong with the universe, but probably not

Timwi — Fri, 24 Jun 2011 20:07:36 GMT

I appreciate how you appear to welcome reports of bugs in the compiler.

I would appreciate it more if these bug reports were actually welcome. So far all of them, (http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/594344/) fatal bugs that silently generate crashing programs, have been marked as won’t fix or otherwise been considered unimportant or unworthy of any attention.

It makes us normal people wonder what the point would be in reporting anything (which is no small amount of effort, creating a minimalist test-case and writing up the report). And it makes Microsoft appear hypocritical if one part keeps asking for bugreports and the other keeps rejecting them.

First off, we do very much appreciate bug reports, so thank you for them.

Second, we do go through and triage all the bug reports we get from Connect. We have many, many thousands of bugs and other issues that we track and not all of them can get a long, personalized reply. They all get attention, but that is not always apparent to the reporter, I know.

Third, it looks like you and Alex are having a reasonable discussion regarding the particular bug you linked to; this is evidence that the system working. It's not always clear to us what is an obscure and unlikely bug, and what real developers run into in real code. We prioritize the latter much more highly. Your explanation of how you came across this helps a lot.

Fourth, I've gotten the feedback I just got from you -- that Connect feels like a black hole into which issues and suggestions are being poured, to no effect whatsoever -- from a considerable number of developer customers over the past couple years. The problem isn't technical; this is a case of the design of the tool not matching the social or emotional expectations of the people using it.

This shortcoming is particularly vexing because (1) the dissatisfaction is irritating a very valuable set of customers: those like you who take time out of their busy days to help us improve our products, and (2) because that impression is totally false. We get great value out of having that stream of issues and suggestions, and it really does improve the product.

The community PMs are trying to figure out how to deal with the shortcomings of Connect in a way that we still get value out of the site. It is a slow process and a hard social-software-design problem to solve. Like Alex said, if you have suggestions for ways to make it better, try posting them on Connect! (The irony is palpable, I know.)

-- Eric

re: Maybe there's something wrong with the universe, but probably not

Rudy Steinhoff — Fri, 27 May 2011 13:45:39 GMT

One of the cuious traits I have always dones is to "act as if" you know and then start programming. As a manager and veteran coder I now see more and more developers who get stuck or think they are crazy. I offer a mindset trick that says act as if you have already solved the problem and proceed. That is not to say you dont do your research and try to figure things out, but often I find developers on my team who wait until the answer comes to them. Get past that and often you will see the forest for the trees.

re: Maybe there's something wrong with the universe, but probably not

DaveShaw — Wed, 11 May 2011 20:35:49 GMT

Someone at my office is still trying to convince me that a bug in our product is because an uninitialised Guid field is not equal to Guid.Empty and it must be a compiler problem, and/or that he should compare the uninitialised to the string "0000-0...".

I might have to send him this article - although he may just mail you Eric with his theory - so maybe not :)

*I think the reason for his crazy assumptions is because the version the on the customer's machine is not the same as the source he's looking at.

re: Maybe there's something wrong with the universe, but probably not

Phil — Wed, 11 May 2011 19:46:55 GMT

Interesting, the world sent you to tell me that I and not it is wrong. What is this world coming to?

re: Maybe there's something wrong with the universe, but probably not

CarlD — Fri, 06 May 2011 23:24:41 GMT

@Ted

It's pretty safe to assume:

VS 2008 SP2: Never

Windows XP SP4: Never

Plannning on anything different is foolhardy at best.

re: Maybe there's something wrong with the universe, but probably not

Dan — Fri, 06 May 2011 19:40:17 GMT

@Bryan That post approaches theoretical maximums for nerdiness. I salute you, sir!

re: Maybe there's something wrong with the universe, but probably not

Ted — Tue, 03 May 2011 05:05:12 GMT

Please address when VS 2008 will get SP2 given that SP1 was released Aug 2008 (over 2.5 years ago). Can we also get XP SP4 since SP3 was released May 2008 (3 years ago).

It's important to us since getting a multi-man year effort approved to do a full retest of one of our larger systems is not possible. Our core systems each have from 200,000 to 750,000 lines of .NET code.

You're asking the wrong guy; I know nothing whatsoever about service pack scheduling. And even if I did, which I emphasize I do not, I can't talk about schedules of unannounced releases. Sorry! -- Eric

re: Maybe there's something wrong with the universe, but probably not

Jonathan — Thu, 28 Apr 2011 16:37:36 GMT

@Pavel: Most of what I am complaining about is that when an error is reported, the information about what caused that error report is thrown away instead of being encoded into the error message.

See these bug reports:

connect.microsoft.com/.../system-badimageformatexception-is-not-informative

connect.microsoft.com/.../typeloadexception-the-signature-is-incorrect-needs-more-information

Due to Microsoft's refusals to fix these problems, and rediculous use of NotSupportedException in derived classes of Type related to generics and emitted types, I am writing my own library to replace System.Reflection.Emit.

In another library that I provide, I use produce two versions, a developer version that does agressive error checking and gives informative error messages, and a release version that assumes the calling program is correct.

re: Maybe there's something wrong with the universe, but probably not

Pavel Minaev [MSFT] — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 20:56:46 GMT

@Jonathan: generally speaking, good error detection and reporting is a good idea. The problem is that, at times, it can be too expensive, especially when most API clients are never going to hit the error case - yet pay the price for error checks.

Sometimes it's a trade-off. VB throws on arithmetic overflow by default on all integral types - handy for detecting those pesky overflow bugs, but you get checks sprinkled throughout your code for every arithmetic op, most of which will never ever hit it in practice. C# does unchecked arithmetic by default, and you have to use /checked+ to enable that. Which one is preferable?

re: Maybe there's something wrong with the universe, but probably not

Bryan — Wed, 27 Apr 2011 20:39:39 GMT

Kudos on the Trek reference. How 'bout an article on small API changes from version to version and compare it to the episode where Worf is shifting between parallel universes every time he comes in proximity of Geordi's visor?