The Daily WTF

Kerry (previously) has a long held belief: people that can’t get the little things right have no hope of getting the big things right, and not just when it comes to software.

Personally, I don’t think that’s truly universal, but it’s certainly a good guideline. If nothing else, seeing certain simple mistakes gives you a hint of worse things to come. Like this interface definition:

long? saveEntry(CreateEntryViewModel dto, out long? IncidentNumber, out int incidentCount, string IncidentOrigination, bool ForceMilesAtPurchase);

Speaking of “small stuff”, one of the smallest things we might expect from a method signature is consistent capitalization. Out of the gate, we fail on that- most of the parameters are PascalCase, but one camelCase entry sneaks in. The method returns a value, but it also has two out parameters- output parameters for when you have a method which doesn’t return a value. The return type and one of

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