Ayende made an interesting light-hearted post concerning developers that spend hours chasing a bug in an application only to find out they forgot to do some utterly trivial thing. Well, stuff like that is maddening. The solutions to these kind of mistakes are utterly nonsensically simple yet we don't know the proper way to prevent them but instead lose time debugging.
The contradiction we have today is that we get these all-encompassing frameworks that do a lot of things by themselves, but are so big we almost always miss something when using them. And instead of losing time writing intelligent stuff we get the stuff ready-made but lose time on trivial mistakes :). But how to solve this time-wasting issue? Microsoft's answer is - guidance. It sounds promising as I believe it would generally be helpful to generate more code (at least skeleton code), but that's not so easy. Also, we should be careful when designing APIs, make them as obvious as possible (even if we have to make dozens of method overloads). And validate and assert everything we can... But that's still not enough. And the stuff we are talking about is ridiculously simple to describe: if you use a TransactionScope you should commit it. How to protect ourselves from this simple mistake? Use FxCop to validate code? Use a higher-level language? Stop coding alltogether and use an AI to generate applications?
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