Friday Funny: Software Development Issues

Today’s Friday Funny is not really a joke, but instead gives a few examples of how not to write software.

Even my previous employer, Microsoft, is not immune and will be my first example.

You might remember a joke along the lines of:

Patient: Doctor, it hurts when I poke myself here.

Doctor: Then don’t poke yourself there.

This appears to be the solution offered by Microsoft to a performance issue in Windows 8.1 when a user name contains the string “user”.

From: High CPU use by taskhost.exe when Windows 8.1 user name contains “user” (KB 3053711)

Symptoms
In Windows 8.1, when the user account name contains the word “user”, intermittently you will find the process taskhost.exe keeps consuming high CPU percentage.

Cause
This is a problem in the component DFPCommon.dl in Windows 8.1.

Resolution
To resolve the issue, do not create a user account contains the string “user” on the computer.

The next couple are screenshots which serve as reminders to avoid the mistakes made by others:

• Even when you never expect an error message to be displayed, keep your language clean.

• Use the correct data types when storing data, for example: don’t use numeric data types for phone numbers.

Click on the images for the original references on imgur.com.

Enjoy

David

This article was originally posted on http://www.winthropdc.com/blog.