vsbabu.org

Code aware IDEs have their uses!

Code is fine. There is nothing sinister or even remotely complex about it. But it simply wouldn’t run. .NET CLR screams it can’t find the definition of a constant - a system constant! What does it mean, it can’t find it? It is right there in front of me.

Ah! This has to be Microsoft’s way of punishing me. Rub eyes again. Double-check Makefile is fine and it is indeed compiling the source I work on. Check the tests are indeed running on the file I modified. Check all dependencies are there.

Curse. Silently.

As luck would have it, one American who has travelled the world was available. It took him one look.

Microsoft has named the constant as DBPROP_CONCATNULLBEHAVIOR. Thanks to the British, and my Indian education, I couldn’t see what is wrong with the constant in my code; DBPROP_CONCATNULLBEHAVIOUR.

Note to self: don’t eat chocolate cake for dessert after dinner. Lack of sleep is not good when one has to think about business logic, nuances of programming languages --it is not every day I get the luxury of using Python-- and different spelling options.

Being as stubborn as I am, let me say that the minor matter of wasted time aside, the whole experience was indeed colourful

1. :) as a brit working in a Big US Company, I know this feeling well :)

   I've kind of learned the hard way to always spell the american way now. "Colour" and its friends just look weird to me now :D

   This reminds me of a while back when people were talking half-seriously about putting a spell checker into the code editor in JDev ;) I think the idea bounced out the window...

   brian

   Posted by: Brian Duff on October 24, 2003 07:16 PM