error numbers

F

Fredrated

Does anyone know if microsoft has a way to look up errors and their
resolution by ERROR NUMBER?

I have never found anything like that. Now they have something called
"Events and Errors Message Center" but even that doesn't appear to let one
look up errors by error number!

Thanks
 
L

Larry Daugherty

You could google these groups for sources of lists of error codes.
There are probably ways you can step through code raising each error
and printing the error and its description to a log file.

As to problem resolution by error code that's a hopeless dream because
the error number and its description that you see may have nothing to
do with the thing in your code that actually caused the Error event.

There is absolutely no compiler that will flawlessly detect the errors
in your code. Most of them are pretty good and they're generally
getting better. However when they fail, the reported errors can be
meaningless and misleading. In time you develop a list of things to
try to make the error go away.

Run time code can be even wilder. Source code that compiles
flawlessly will often fail repeatably. That's why software
manufacturers have QA departments. The best software QA department I
ever saw, bar none, was at DEC circa 1980 on their DECMate
wordprocessor software. The differentiator was that the initial level
of testing during product development was populated by novice users
with minimal computer expertise and training. They were given
wordprocessing tasks to do. They would do the most ridiculous things
that often caused errors. They would first report the error to their
supervisor. If it wasn't related to the product they were thanked,
told how to avoid that error in the future and sent back to their
task. Often they would flush errors out of code that the individual
developer (once it was isolated to the offending module) had delivered
as bullet proof. The QA folks had to then go talk to the relevant
developer. They were always surprised when the developer started the
interview with "That's great, you can't believe what a contribution
you're making". Unfortunately for us, there was a high turnover in
that group. Once they got proficient at using the software they no
longer flushed out the wild errors.

If you could flawlessly tell developers the exact things that they
must do to prevent *each and every* error then Bill Gates or Steve
Ballmer will have a private jet and a limousine on its way to you with
an offer that would eclipse the contracts of NBA and NFL stars.

HTH
 
Top