.NET handles it for you:

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You really should never see this one, but I could say that about all of these, couldn’t I?

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I only use this application once in a great while (this was my second try with it), and I only spent a couple minutes with it as a user, not as a tester. Yet, here it is, an asplosion.

Am I just talented, or does the world of applications just suck that badly?

Whenever I’m planning or estimating for a financial application of any sort, I always plan for weeks of testing. Then, I don’t get called back. No doubt development shops the world over can find lower bidders (or none at all!)

And here you go.

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You know how you find that error?  You just test.  It stems from a basic oversight in hooking up the database to the interface, where the application lets you delete something you’re not supposed to delete.

You should never see this sort of stack trace.  It leaks all sorts of insight into your database structure.

You should never see this sort of stack trace.  But you probably will.

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You know how to check for that?  Load testing, perhaps, where you pile in a whole lot of records, I suppose, or overloading an uploading sort of application using your 100Gb test files.

But brace yourself: when you encounter this in a test environment, your developers will tell you it’s due to the limitations of test environment (and you can’t try it on the production server because it’s the production server, and your test might successfully break it on the Internet).  But you have to push back.  Otherwise somebody like Max might find it in production.

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You should really handle that programmatically.  Especially if your entire site hides within a Content Management System, and this little timeout makes it look like your site is irrevocably broken.

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In this case, it looks like it’s supposed to dish up a banner ad that the application cannot handle, resulting in havoc.

How do you find these things? Well, you just have to try to load the page. If you’ve got some sort of banner ad rotation algorithm going on, you have to reload the page. A lot.

A very basic automated test could do this for you; simply have the script load the page and use some navigation on the page. If the automated test bombs out, it could be because the navigation wasn’t there. Heck, even Empirix can handle that.

Wait a minute, someone just told me that Gopher was the Pacific Princess’s purser, whatever the heck that means. Oh, well, too late now, the gag’s done.

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When the application says, “The return URL specified for request redirection is invalid.”, it really means “Dude, why did you put all those nasty, ill-encoded characters in the URL when you know I can’t handle them?”

To find this particular beauty, you need to watch for your application dumping a lot of data onto the querystring between transactions. Then, wait for it to time out in the middle of the operation. Your application can then recognize you’ve timed out and direct you to the login page with a return URL on the querystring (if your application does this, of course). When you try to log back in, the application chokes on its own URL.

Beautiful!

For more information, see this piece on ASP.NET migration and this bit entitled “Silent Breaking-Change to FormsAuthentication::RedirectFromLoginPage.”

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Build an application where you force the interface through the pipe along with the actual logic, and you’re asking for trouble. Have some.

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You can see this bad oscar when the application needs to create a datetime built out of computations instead of simple drop-down lists with day/month/year/time in them and the application doesn’t do it right.

Or if you try to explain your concept of deadlines to a developer engrossed in finding Cloverfield spoilers instead of building a proper calendar widget.