Microsoft Is the Best Company on Earth

220 days. Longer than Noah's little adventure, that's for sure. Hey, but it's less than a year since my last post. You could say I'm on a roll. Really crankin' 'em out, right?

But anyway, this is supposed to be a rant blog about the evils of Microsoft Software, isn't it? This time, however, it's nothing but a big kudos for my favorite software company. You see, I accidentally published a rant on my web site that didn't make it into this blog. You can see it on my web site under Time Sink. As I said on that page, comments were sent to Microsoft. I just figured they were words down a rathole. But no. Within 48 hours I got a response from Microsoft asking for more details. I replied with a little sample and some citations from the MSDN documentation. Within another 48 hours I got this cheerful note:

A long time ago when this feature was first implemented, exceptions in the Converter were caught with validation, but the behavior was changed soon after.

This means that ExceptionValidationRule only applies to exceptions thrown in the setter of the property, and not in the Converter.

The doc still specifies the old behavior. We're fixing it now and the change will appear in the next doc refresh.

Wow! They actually listened. This reminds me of the Microsoft of the 1980's, not the Microsoft of the 1990's. There was a time there when I thought there were actually no people working for Microsoft, only possibly robots.