It’s not fixed until you’ve broken it at least twice

It’s not fixed until you’ve broken it at least twice

Benjamin Tinker | 31/10/2011

As a developer it is important to ensure your code works and has been property tested prior to being given to a client. The trick to this is to try to break your code a few times by interacting with it before you can be sure it is safe. If after randomly clicking on links for buying items, downloading PDFs and using parts of the site the rely on third party APIs your site is still going, then your onto a good thing. A normal developer should see some wonder full stack dump error logs during this process showing that their code is not 100%.

Along comes Elmah. This is a great tool for actively debugging your code once it has gone to a live environment without having the client see those ugly stack trace errors (website yellow screen of death). This tool can be placed on your server to which you can access a very friendly error log console that shows all manner of error information that your site is handling in the back ground while the client sees a pretty 500 error page. With Elmah in place you can break your code in your local environment and the live environment and then come back to fix it once. Break it twice and then fix it. 

tags: Web Development