On passion for programming

CreationSoul

Romania231 Posts

October 02 2013 19:29 GMT

Very short blog.

I work as a software engineer and I have been working on (very) complicated task for the past month. I was very stressed out because my code was failing in some very weird cases and only on Windows 8. After 1 week of debugging and some conference calls with some Microsoft engineers, it was finally discovered that they have a bug in their API.

This is a new achievement for me: to find bugs in the Windows API.

3FFA

United States3931 Posts

October 02 2013 20:22 GMT

Congrats, but could you do us the favor of going into just a little bit more detail as to what the bug was?

CecilSunkure

United States2829 Posts

October 02 2013 20:38 GMT

Congrats, also: everything in Windows 8 is broken; not your fault (or so I hear!).

jrkirby

United States1510 Posts

October 02 2013 23:10 GMT

Not too much surprising.

beg

991 Posts

October 03 2013 00:28 GMT

sounds awesome.

lovely passion you have there.

ElMeanYo

United States1032 Posts

October 03 2013 05:23 GMT

I feel for you because this is so frustrating... having worked with MS products for so long... I've wasted many a day trying to figure out if it was my bug or Microsofts.

I much prefer that they be my bugs because then at least I can do something about them

Chairman Ray

United States11903 Posts

October 03 2013 07:57 GMT

I can totally relate to this. Sometimes at work I also have to figure out if something is my bug or a bug on Microsoft's side. It turns out they're one in the same.

peacenl

550 Posts

October 03 2013 13:37 GMT

I think most the programmers can recall a moment like this, where we start questioning our sanity. Like: "I know this is right, am I losing my mind?". I also vote for more detail.

LastWish

2015 Posts

October 03 2013 13:40 GMT

Microsoft is a trademark for flawed software.
I think that in order to get into the company you need to make at least a few bugs in your code at the interview.

Although they have made some really good programs like Visual Studio, so I'm not really hating them

spinesheath

Germany8679 Posts

October 03 2013 13:56 GMT

#10

Gee, all the hate. Of course Microsoft products have bugs. All software systems of that size have bugs.

Good job finding one though.

adwodon

United Kingdom592 Posts

October 03 2013 20:33 GMT

#11

I had something similar recently with AMD FirePro cards not displaying one of our dialogues properly, despite working on our cards, nvidia cards and on board.

Was fucking infuriating trying to figure it out, I eventually found a workaround which involved moving a ShowWindow() before a section of code as opposed to after and this seemed to resolve the issue. Exactly what the reason was I have no idea, we were essentially launching a dialogue then loading a DLL which then painted on top of it, with FirePro cards it wouldn't paint over the top, although interestingly, not setting the window as the dialogues parent would cause it paint, just obviously not be attached to the window.

I think the worst part of it all was that 'our' software in this case was written by a 'senior' software engineer who didn't last his 6 month probation period. I graduated a year ago and I write infinitely better, more readable software than this 'senior' engineer.

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