Again, Microsoft Blows

Ok, I got something that all of you dorks out there are going to love……especially if you absolutely hate Microsoft. So my latest project at work has been to create an asp page (which is a web page that has a bunch of code for the server to execute). This page had to display all of the folders in a specific directory along with all of its subfolders and files. For each file, the name of it should have linked to the location of the file so that if you clicked on it, the file would download.

So I created the page as best I could, but for some reason it would sometimes work and at other times wouldn’t. I looked online for help but couldn’t find any. I asked Joe for some help and we worked on it for about an hour or so before we finally gave up. Right as we were giving up, though, we figured out the problem…..and it wasn’t because of what we were doing—microsoft’s visual basic 6.0 was broken.

In the code that we had, the pathname of the file was determined, but that can’t work for a hyperlink because certain characters have to be made into associated code for a hyperlink to work properly. For example, if you had the file: C:\thisfolder\this subfolder\file.here you would not be able to have that as your hyperlink. There can’t be spaces in hyperlinks so you have to run the filename through a URLEncoder function. This would make that file name read C:\thisfolder\this%20subfolder\file.here because spaces turn into %20. Well, the URLEncoder function didn’t do this, it instead turned all spaces into a + sign so none of the hyperlinks would work. How the hell does this make it through their quality assurance testing? Because of it we either have to upgrade to ASP.NET or install a different webserver simply to get this type of a page to work. Un-frickin’-believable!

So an hour later……and two days of wasted work later, we scrap the page since it won’t work. We’re going to try and switch over to Tomcat (a different webserver) and serve the pages as jsp’s (which is the non-MS way of doing these pages). I’m still more than a little pissed right now, but I’ll eventually get over it. The main reason I’m so mad about it is that I could have spent those two days working on the gargantuan manual I’m writing. It is supposed to be done in like a month and a half and I don’t know if I’ll be able to do that considering I’m learning how the program works as I’m writing the manual.

Ok, vent session over. Now I must get back to work, however, since I’m operating a few days behind. I’ll probably never get this site completely updated either. I have a new menubar system that corrects some issues that the current one has, but I don’t know when I’ll get it up. Eh, I’ll let you know when and if I do. Until then, everyone please raise their middle fingers in a worldwide salute to MS.