"Having worked in the Computer industry for about twenty years now," Matt writes, "I rarely get the chance to actually write code. But I do get the joy of other people's problems landing at my feet when things go wrong."

"Not too long ago, one of our newer techies emailed me, complaining that he couldn't get load image data from a WebService created by another developer. Given that all of the XML serialization and deserialization is handed through our enterprisey library, it was only when I visted the WebService address in my browser that I was able to see the 'raw' data:

<attachments xmlns = "http://webservices..." > <bytes>37</bytes> <bytes>80</bytes> <bytes>68</bytes> <bytes>70</bytes> <bytes>45</bytes> <bytes>49</bytes> <bytes>46</bytes> <bytes>52</bytes> <bytes>10</bytes> <bytes>37</bytes> <bytes>-30</bytes> <bytes>-29</bytes> <bytes>-49</bytes> <bytes>-45</bytes> <bytes>10</bytes> <bytes>52</bytes> <bytes>32</bytes> <bytes>48</bytes> <bytes>32</bytes> <bytes>111</bytes> ... "The error, for those that care, was that our code expected values in the range 0 to 255, rather than -127 to 128.