I reached critical levels of frustration last night working on the last bits of my CS11 work.
Because of Microsoft's idiocy and incompetence, I lost the better part of two hours of my life last night in frustration and annoyance.
I want my !@#$% two hours back. No, I want ALL of the time I spent waste in frustration because of Microsoft's bullshit software back. That should account for an extra year. And for that kind of pain, I want $100 an hour. Lessee, at 2,080 hours a year, that's $208,000 they owe me. Bastards.
I should probably have found the problem in only an hour, but I really wasn't expecting the level of idiocy the problem was a symptom of. I mean really.
Their BUILT IN !@#$% showed the file just fine. The code was just fine. If I stripped everything out things worked. I discovered, after some suffering, that a single comment in the file broke things.
It took a while to get to that point, though, because the error messages had nothing to do with ANYTHING.
Which is what was so !@#$% annoying and mysterious about it. The error messages would change around a bit, but never seemed relevant to anything.
The code that was !@#$%ing with me was downloaded as part of the class, so I got suspicious about garbage invisible characters in it. So I loaded it up under a DECENT editor (Scite... find it, get it, love it) and discovered that the offending file was terminated in CR (carriage return).
Native termination for windows is the bullshit CR/LF (carriage return and linefeed pairs).
The compiler or, more likely, the pre-processor couldn't cope. Even though everthing showed the file as being just fine (the editor, the post-processed expanded listings, EVERYTHING), it was actually puking deep inside the system where nobody could see it. And it wasn't giving rational errors.
So I wasted two hours of my life chasing down a termination incompatability.
It isn't like it's HARD to make a parser cope with CR and/or CR/LF terminators. It's easy. Their IDE did it. I've done it before. Diseased monkeys could probably write code that would do it.
So I want my two hours back.
Bastards.