When is a bug a bug

I've had a handful of downloads on the Active Last Logon beta, but so far not feedback. From what I hear that's typical. It's hard to get good beta feedback.

I have found one bug so far during testing, but is it really a bug? Let me explain, I was testing the case when a domain controller is offline. I've tested this case in previous builds and it has worked exactly as expected. This time it crashed. I was surprised since I believed I'd tested this case already.

Then I found the problem. Turns out that I found two bugs. The first was a bug in my testing protocol. Instead of taking a domain controller offline, I just manually edited Active Directory to add a fake one. Well the bug was I added the fake domain controller wrong. I neglected to create all the objects that should exist for a domain controller.

The second bug was that Active Last Logon crashes when there is a improperly added fake domain controller. :) So is this really a bug. I decided that yes it is. I don't want there to be any cases were things "just crash". Even though there is very little chance this would happen in the real world I decided to mark it as a bug and fix it. I can imagine a weird case were someone's domain gets messed up and could cause this crash.

So what am I saying with this post?

1. Automate or at least document the steps to your testing
2. A bug is a bug. If you can imagine it happening and it crashes the whole app fix it!

The beta is now available

Well it is late(the time and the beta) so here it is. I'll post more about it tommorow. Active Last Logon beta