Ken's Blog | When you know .Net 1.1 is half-baked

Tuesday, 5. April 2005

When you know .Net 1.1 is half-baked04/05/2005 09:13 PM

I've been meaning to gripe about this for a while, but you have to wonder about the rest of .Net when Microsoft.VisualBasic.Collection seems like it was written by someone unfamiliar with how it's used in ASP and VB. One major oversight is you can't get a list of keys to the collection, so you can only iterate over values. In ASP, you used to be able to get a set of the keys so you could display key/value pairs. In the debugger, it's obvious that the key/value pairs are stored in the Collection object, but you can't get at them through any public APIs.

Then there's the extremely "useful" error message you get when you try to use an invalid key: "Argument 'Index' is not a valid value." Note that the quoted static 'Index' string is actually what you see in the error message instead of the key you tried to look for in the Collection; nope, it doesn't even display an index value. What bright person thought that was a good idea? In ASP, if you access a Collection w/ an invalid key, it returns a blank string to you. I suppose you could say you're getting more information, even with this useless error message, but it should be an optional behavior.

I've heard that MS refuses to use Extreme Programming techniques, but this is just silly stuff that would have been caught w/ simple unit testing. Hope they fix this in .Net 2.0

Comments :

1. t07/05/2007 16:47:34

In 2.0 it is still that shit bad!!! (spent half an hour trying to figure out what does this error message means)

2. anon coward05/10/2007 15:36:50

use the "contains" operation

3. Hector04/07/2005 11:54:48

> I've heard that MS refuses to use Extreme Programming techniques

Not true. A buddy of mine is a team lead there and he has an XP process.

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