31st May 2007:
Note that this has become my primary source of spam so I’ve disabled comments. Sorry if you felt the need to comment on a 12 month old post, if you really feel the need to comment please contact me at the links above and I’ll re-enable them temporarily ;)

I woke up this morning to find that Nick Bradbury had posted about a particularly nasty WinINet bug that causes the application to hang (or in this case, the update thread sat on 100% cpu).  I’ve worked with this API a bit myself, and it’s essential unless you want to get bogged down in TCP and HTTP details in a windows application.

Much like other commenters to the post, including one who blogged about the bug in February 2005, I held little hope that MS would ever fix it.  The bug has existed since 1997, and… well this is Microsoft we’re talking about here.  They’re famous for not fixing bugs.

At least, until now.  This is the first sign in my corner of the development world that Microsoft are picking themselves up and actually responding quickly to user feedback.

A mere 7 hours after Nick’s post, a MS dev (Eric Law) finds the post and leaves a comment asking for URLs to reproduce this with.  Same thing I would’ve done.  Nick of course instantly responds.

35 minutes later, another MSFT comment – this time it’s David Powell, Product unit manager, Windows networking developer platform.  This was a WTF moment for me.  The bug has been reopened, and they posted 3hrs after that saying the bug has been reproduced so it’s under investigation.  I’m drooling at this point ;)

So what’s changed since February 2005?  Things like technorati.  This proves without a doubt that somewhere in Microsoft, they’re subscribed to searches such as the one AJ found me on so they can pick up people blogging about the product.

 

David mentioned in his comment the best place to report bugs in WNDP components, and that well-triaged bugs are noticed - http://connect.microsoft.com/wndp.  A few google searches later, and it turns out the IE team has a site on Microsoft Connect as well.  Woot!  Between the WNDP response and the availability of a good public bug tracker, I’ve now been convinced to report any bugs I see while working with IE code.  Previously I’ve just avoided the bug and found a better way.