UI blunderz

Visual Studio, that erstwhile desktop development tool used by millions of Windows based developers since the late '90s, has been through many a revision. Unfortunately, like any complex piece of software, some of these interesting and progressive revisions also involved the odd regressive bug, where the tool hit an unexpected state that it cannot handle. Words fail to describe     Catastrophic failure! Catastrophic indeed! In classic application developed software, handling 'undefined' situations that are not expected, leads to undefined behavior, where no one really knows how the system will continue to behave. Such situations pose a danger to any data involved, such as documents that the user is editing, since at the very least, the user may lost their current unsaved changes. Worse, if the program continues its imperative path (where the computer is blindly following instructions given by the original authors of the software), then the data may actually become corr...

Programming is hard! The classic imperative programming model, where the computer performs the exact instructions as given by the programmer, places a huge burden on the shoulders of the all-too-fallible human coder. The problem is one of managing complexity , and one of communication to and from the computer and the human being. The human works by attempting to create an internal mental model that is as accurate and complete as possible, of what is actually going on inside the computer. So, some coders are far more productive than others, making less mistakes and able to make more accurate and complexity-managed software.  However, with today's complex and multi-vendor hardware, even the simplest smartphone or laptop is never fully understood by one single human coder. Worse, the human coder is relying upon a wobbly stack of existing code created by previously similarly limited human coders. In some respects, it is amazing that any software works most of the time! Here is an ex...