<rant mode=”funny”>
Most of the time I submitted an issue to Microsoft Connect, I got a “it’s by design” answer. I’ve been always irritated by this sentence because they don’t admit in this way that they have a bug. Today, I understood I’m wrong. It’s a bureaucracy issue.
If you pretend that something is a bug, you are stating that a developer wrongly coded a program because it does not meet the requirements and the specifications. If the design is wrong, and the program is written “by design”, then the program is wrong but you cannot say it has a bug.
Now, what if the design is wrong? Simple: we don’t have a way to submit a design issue. In the Microsoft Connect site you have only two forms: the bug form and the suggestion form. Please, add a third form: I need the design issue form. May be nobody thought this before. It could be that simple? May be… Now the question is: what is the right form to ask for the add of a new form? I hope somebody can help me with this.
</rant>
For those of you who are asking what has been the issue that exceeded the “enough is enough” limit, take a look at this one, which has received an answer more than one year (one year!) after its submission. Technically speaking, the behavior of CAST is right. However, it requires that you convert a VARCHAR into a FLOAT and then into a NUMERIC if the initial string contains a number in exponential form. I know that in this case the “by design” answer has solid foundation and don’t justify my reaction :-) but you know… I was right several other times and this time the “by design” answer started my post minutes before I realized that design reasons were good… too late, my rant was too funny to be deleted :-)