CodeSOD

Sandy Barnabas received a rather odd message when submitting a registration form:

I'm always amazed at the lengths some people will go to 'enterprise up' there Java apps," Ben writes, "especially those daft Yes/No enums that we've seen here lately."

At David’s company, management wasn’t a big fan of the whole check-in/re-compile/re-deploy process. They felt that it had too many steps and took far too long to complete. Their organization needed to adapt to software changes - especially bug fixes - much faster. So, to address this problem, they thoroughly analyzed the development process and carefully tweaked it for efficiency. I’m just kidding. Actually, their solution was to pioneer a new methodology called “SQL Sentences”.

"In C," writes Keith Lucas, "literal floating point number are interpreted as double precision floating point numbers. For example, if you have '0.0' in your code, the compiler will determine the type of '0.0' to be 'double'. In some compilers, such as the Visual C++ 6 compiler that we use, if a literal 'double' is used for a function with a 'float' parameter, a compiler warning is issued because the literal could be less accurate."

In the world of .NET, the Right Way to include newlines in a string is with the Environment.NewLine constant. Of course, given how easy "\n" is, few developers actually follow this rule.

"When I went to dispute my credit information," Raj K wrote, "I noticed that the company's online form required a complex password. The developer in me was curious as to how the validation was implemented, so I viewed the page source. Shortly thereafter, my palm quickly met my forehead."

"You'd think that the C++ Boolean would be a welcome addition to the language," writes Jake E. "Not so much for our outsourcing company. This is what's now in our constants.h file."

"Where I work we keep a lot of data stored in XML files," Ben writes. "They're not your average XML files, though — they're special." His colleague invented the following technique (recommended for senior level XML programmers only).

For some tasks, you're presented an opportunity to do things the easy way or the hard way. When your friend is proudly showing off his work at replacing a light fixture, the switch, and all the wiring, you might wonder why not just replace the dead bulb?

"At manufacturing companies," Brent Railey wrote, "all you ever hear about is SAFETY, SAFETY, SAFETY. In fact, that was exactly the type of application I was tasked with reviewing: an 'Activity Based Safety Program' application for the corporate offices. It was a Classic ASP application that was 'slightly customized' from another application."