Category: <span>Amusements</span>

Having blogged recently about some great error messages, I came across another one! Microsoft much employ people to craft these, they just couldn’t be there by accident. I reckon they are put there to amuse developers, and distract them from the fact that the software is misbehaving!

Anyway, I was using the SQL Server Import and Export Wizard, and it threw up the following error message:

Error 0xc004706b: Data Flow Task 3: “Destination 14 – EntityHistory” failed validation and returned validation status “VS_ISBROKEN”

I just love that last bit!

Bored of the usual methods of inflicting torture upon myself, I thought I would upgrade SQL Server 2008 R2 to SQL Server 2014 (stop laughing at the back!), because, erm, well it seemed like a good idea at the time.

Read more to hear the whole sorry story

Two programming-related jokes that amused me

“I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.”

Danish computer scientist Bjarne Stroustrup

Of course, we professional programmers never make mistakes, ahem. That’s why we never need to use debuggers, ahem.

Well suspend belief for a moment, and assume that I had a bug in the code I was developing. You know the feeling, you stare at it, you write unit tests, you stare at it some more, and still can’t work out why on earth Visual Studio is claiming that there is an error in your code, when it’s so obvious that there isn’t. You even get to the point of talking to your computer, pointing out the error of its ways…

I was underwhelmed at being awarded two separate recognitions for my contribution to the community.

Read on and be as underwhelmed as I was!

Sadly, whilst building a solution yesterday, my machine started behaving in a very weird manner, with applications not responding, the taskbar disappearing and so on, followed by the dreaded blue screen of death. When I checked the event log after pulling the plug out (I hate doing that!) and rebooting, I found lots of errors, which led me to a Microsoft Connect article (now sadly removed) where someone was reporting a very similar problem.

To my amazement, the very last comment by a Microsoft employee in response to this bus report was “This is known issue, this bug was resolved by mistake, we are already addressing this issue.”

Surely they didn’t mean that did they? Someone tell me I read that wrong!