As Time Goes By

I looked at the following code and thought it should replace a file’s existing extension with “.xml”.

It might be easy to spot in isolation, but when “foo.log” didn’t transform into “foo.xml” on disk, I went looking for the hard stuff first – swallowed exceptions, bad conditional logic, etc. I didn’t see the misplaced paren until later.

Another waste of time was a production app that looked like it was running under a user’s credentials instead of the NETWORK SERVICE account. A quick glance at the badly formatted web.config file seemed to indicate everything was setup properly. Impersonation should only be on for requests in the ManagementStuff directory.

This time I went off looking at IIS settings, machine.config settings, and even had FileMon and Process Explorer running. After some time I returned to the web.config and noticed someone closed the location element tag too early. ASP.NET was using impersonation for the entire application.

While on the topic of wasting time – when using Google to search for “Tablet PC”, the first ‘sponsored link’ to appear is www.Dell.com. It’s nice of the Dell sales and marketing department to sponsor this link, considering they don’t sell a Tablet PC. I wonder how long it takes the average web surfer to figure out there are no Tablet’s available, and how many of them feel deceived.

Occam’s razor can save us time with the debugger, but can’t save us from salespeople.