Sin ley

About my previous blog entry

Some people asked why I wrote that entry. It's simple: let's say someone disregarded a bug report from the main character of the story after a quick look at the report, without paying much attention. After that, someone realized that the test case was indeed very good and the bug was one of the most wanted. So that someone was happy for the progress made on the reporter side and for sqashing another bug. Then he told me to write that story.

Other people wanted the story to be changed so that there was more interaction between the girl and the guy that disregarded the bug report...

Ajax.NET

To celebrate that Ajax.NET is going open source, I tested it and found two bugs in Mono's System.Web plus one that I filed for them. The two bugs in Mono are fixed in SVN and I uploaded a System.Web.dll for people that don't use SVN. Just grab that file, gunzip and gacutil -i System.Web.dll.

And last, but not least...

Joe raised a very valid point in his blog. He also made me smile while reading that. I hope everyone else takes those problems with at least the same sense of humor :-). I'd like to be dogfooding more Mono ASP.NET in our sites (only monodoc by now), but I have no legislative power.

Once upon a time, connected to the internet, there was a programmer. He was good. Damn good. As a natural step for his avidness of knowledge, he learnt C#. One day he realized there was something called Mono out there, so he decided to try it out and he ended up using linux too, which, he found, was the OS that most Mono developers used.

He loved feeling the power that the command line gave him and he was happy... Until he found a defect, so called 'bug': something was working fine on windows with the MS runtime but failed on mono! He couldn't believe that. He was puzzled. Upset. Angry. Outrageous. Then, slowly, he started being conscious about his power. He calmed down. "Wait, I'm a good programmer and I can get the source code for this. I'll fix it", he thought. So he began debugging the problem. He couldn't make the Mono debugger work, but, relentless, he decided to modify the source so that it printed information that helps him figure out what the problem is. After some time, he realized he was hungry. In fact, it was dinner time. "Jeez! I've already spent 2 hours trying to fix this", he said.

He didn't say a word during dinner. He was thinking about that girl he was dating that night, "Yeah, she's hot". "Not as much as that bug you cannot fix". Who said that? It was just him. He couldn't stop thinking about that problem. But he didn't have time. He had to go out. So he decided to file a quick bug report. He didn't even bother to add a simple test case. He just wrote a few words trying to explain the symptoms of the problem. Then he dressed up and went out to have some fun.

Meanwhile, in other corner of the internet, someone saw that bug report. "Jeez. Not much I can do with this... Let's see if I can make a test case", he said. He tried, but no luck. After some time he decided to move on to something else. He quickly forgot everything about that bug report. Everything but the name of the reporter. "I'll never waste my time again on a bug report by that guy", he thought.

The girl was feeling almost the same about the guy. "He does not seem the kind of guy that pay attention to details", she thought while she was paying for drinks. "He can't even dance".

Update: Eventually, the bug reporter realized that it takes less time to create a simple test case and his bug reports are fixed quickly when he attaches test cases. He pays for drinks now.