I raged last Friday over a stupid designed choice Microsoft made for .Net framework. It all started with benign change, I changed folder where game settings were stored. When I tried to test the change the main window refused to close. I stabbed red "close window" button a couple more times but to no avail. It seamed as absurd as not being able to start a car because a house few street away has new door. So I paused the program through debugger and it turned out that "close window" event was being aborted for some reason. For those unfamiliar with MS Windows Forms, program can subscribe to "somebody requested to close the window" event. On such event the program is notified and can act upon it and even prevent closing. Stareater GUI code is subscribed to such event and naturally I checked it out:
A single line that saves settings. There is no code that cancels closing. With debugger tools I followed internals of
SettingsWinforms.Get.Save() and it's execution wasn't as I expected. It was cut in a middle of execution. I spent some time trying why and it turned out there was an exception being thrown (sort of runtime error) inside
Save. When a program doesn't handle an exception it usually crushes but proper programming tool catches it and presents plenty of information that helps programmer to fix it. Take a look at Visual Studio 2010:
It clearly says where the code broke and why. Other C# IDEs (programs for programming) also offer such good debugging tools so it's kind of expected that every exception will show on programmers radar. But no, Microsoft decided that in certain conditions window must not crush. If exception occurs in such situations, framework will catch it and "handle" it by not doing anything. That's called silent failure. This is how it looks like when it happens within "window is about to close" event:
Do you see it? I made similar divide by zero error like on previous image. Take some time. It's hidden in the last line in the "Output" window at the bottom. On top of that full message doesn't fit the window. Now I hope You can understand, dear reader, why I was furious.
Reasoning behind silent failure is usually that end user is see less crushes. In my opinion it's just giving the sense of false security for end user and as demonstrated makes job unnecessarily more difficult for programmer. There is absolutely no benefit from it in "debug mode".
And in the end, how did saving settings prevented window from closing? Destination folder didn't exist. Normally when non-existent file is open for writing it is automatically created. Apparently creating missing folders is completely different beast but it's OK as long as I get informed when my presumption turns to be wrong.
