UI blunderz

A friendly  Visual Studio  dialog Microsoft have a mixed history of reaching and maintain UX standards. Although admittedly the standards have risen greatly in the last 2 decades in particular, partly due to the increase in raw CPU and video of typical devices, there were early bad signs with for example the MSDOS prompt and its appalling BAT script environment, compared to the contemporary UNIX OS. Here, Visual Studio has some kind of generic error message, with a horrid modal (blocks all user input) dialog and a matchingly horrid design. Yuk, indeed.

Team Explorer is/was a part of Visual Studio IDE (a tool used by Windows-based application developers). This part involved retrieving and committing source code to remote source control systems, mainly Microsoft's Team Foundation Server (TFS). TFS is not a new acronym, and one of its older, colonial-days meanings was Tropical Fatigue Syndrome, the effects of which would be familiar to any unfortunate developer as they struggled with various Team Server errors: Why these errors are displayed at all to the user, is basically to halt the dumb imperative program in its tracks , before it can do more damage. Why would damage be done to the user's precious data? The dumb, command-following program has hit an unexpected, not-designed-for problem, and were it to continue, its behavior is, like a beautiful Porsche stolen by an insane criminal mastermind,  actually completely undefined. Not even the coders who originally built the software would know what exactly would happen next! ...

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...