One product's feature is another product's bug -- just ask 'em!

by Michael S. Kaplan, published on 2007/05/06 13:18 -04:00, original URI: http://blogs.msdn.com/b/michkap/archive/2007/05/06/2448753.aspx


Different products have different ways of describing what is essentially the same behavior.

Part of the reason for this is that the audiences are often very different, and it is therefore a matter common sense that something might be described differently.

But more of the reason is usually due to the differing ways that users might run across the behavior -- and whether they would consider it a bug or a feature....

For example, there is the whole issue of WORD sort vs. STRING sort that I have discussed in the past, and the fact that WORD sorting is the default since it makes the most sense linguistically in the way it treats (for example) hyphenated words.

This particular behavior and the fact that it is the default in Windows really is considered a feature.

But you can see how Microsoft Jet describes it in MS KB 236952 (PRB: Sort Order Has Changed with Microsoft Jet version 4.0) -- it is treated as a by design behavior change, with a bizarre combination of examples and explanatory text that is guaranteed to make anyone reading it feel like this is a bug (plus some incorrect descriptions, as well!).

To top it off, it claims that SQL Server full-text queries and Index server have similar behavior when searching (which they do), and then points to another article presumably implying they are related (they are not), which I will talk about another time....

 

This post brought to you by(U+0a86, a.k.a. GUJARATI LETTER AA)


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