Besides contributing at @TheDailyWTF, I write DevDisasters for Visual Studio Magazine, and involved in various side projects including child rearing and marriage.

"One of our desktop applications has a progress bar in it," Bryce N. writes, "and as I was working more and more with the code, I noticed that the progress bar would progress to a seemingly random part in the bar, but never past the halfway mark. This would probably be ignored, if it weren't for the fact that I noticed that my breakpoints would only be hit when the bar reached the 'random' mark."

"While I was trying to discover why, I found this in the code:"

/* There is really NO eloquent way of calculating what the progress * of a given method/task will be. One task may be downloading or copying a file while another * one might be grabbing huge chunks of data for file creation. Since we want to see * a progress indicator but can't determine this value, we'll simply play with it so it has the * appearance of running; (i.e. we'll take it to 50%, execute the task, then come back and finish * the progress upon completion.) This is a Microsoft STANDARD... I'm sure of it! */ Random R = new Random(); int _percentage = R.Next(Convert.ToInt32(.5 * _bar.Maximum)); string status = ""; for (int i = 0; i < _bar.Maximum; i++) { if (i == _percentage) { //execute the real code } // Always perform progress step _bar.PerformStep(); }

"Well, there you have it, the code tells the progress bar to progress somewhere between 0 and 1/5 the length of the bar, then execute the real code. Brillant!"