With Windows applications, whilst big bugs can be a serious hassle and put a hell of a crimp in your day, I don’t come across them all that often (touch wood). The things that do cause me to shout and scream and grind my teeth in frustration are the little tiny niggles which occur often, and aren’t a serious problem, but are enough to throw me off my train of thought or put a sudden stop to those nice, productive flows of work that happen every now and again – the kind of bug equivalent of a charity woman turning up at your table in the pub asking for money for horses, or something – kills the mood immediately and it takes a couple of minutes for things to get back to normal again afterwards.
My favourite bug of this variety is the one in Visual Studio.NET (and – don’t get me wrong – I really like Visual Studio; things like tab-complete on method names, tooltip parameter lists, lack of having to write makefiles, a very powerful debugger, good, integrated help, etc, all make the life of a developer so much more pleasant and productive) which means that, every so often, it will freeze up and do nothing for a couple of minutes. It always recovers, but it takes sufficiently long that it’s not just a case of take a deep breath, wait a couple of seconds and continue, but it’s equally not quite long enough to justify getting up to make a cup of tea or something.
So, what little niggling “undocumented features” make your life a misery?
That would be the idiot behind the keyboard who slowly over time corrupts his system to the point of non usability.
Damn thats me. Bugger.
Visual Feckin Studio.Feckin NET 2002. What an utter bucket of wank. Autocomplete on member names, you say? Doesn’t work any more on our project. What it does instead is completely lock up. I’ve left it overnight in the hope it would recover, it doesn’t. You have to kill it. What’s more, because it doesn’t save your settings I have to remember to turn off autocomplete every time I start the bastarding thing. It’s wank. 2003 is much more stable, but we don’t have licences to use it at the moment. Err, rant over!
We had the same issues with 2002. When we contacted MS about it, they basically admitted that 2002 was a big pile of poo, and everyone should upgrade to 2003. I think we got upgrade licenses for about 30quid a seat (but don’t quote me on that) and it was well worth it.
One great big undocumented error. It’s called IE.
Adobe Premiere has the occasional habit of rendering several seconds of grey where actual video footage should be in the video I’m editing at the moment. I think it’s related to the fact that some of the source .avi files are on an SMB-shared directory on my Linux fileserver, but it still gets on my tits.
One thing we noticed with Visual Studio is that if you have loads of breakpoints set it will sometimes hang as you change bits of code… Also if you are using visual studio then get WndTabs – it is really useful!