At the start of 2008 I changed jobs and moved into a whole new world of software that only runs on Microsoft Windows.

Like virtually the rest of the development world I’ve worked with windows software before and was aware that software developed on windows was often buggy.

What I hadn’t anticipated when I moved to the new company was the level of apathy felt towards error reporting by windows programs. On the project I’m currently working on this has grown to an annoying level. Each day there are tens of thousands of errors reported in the event logs for the application and it’s various components. Fortunately we have a system where we can search for a particular error that we are interested in. But this hides the real issue at hand which is that there is way too much noise in the error reports. This means that if you were to look for new errors that shouldn’t be happening you can’t find them.

Consider the following scenario, You want to add an item to a shopping cart.

In the software you could:

1. A.Add the item to the shopping cart object. If the object doesn’t exist throw and exception, create a new shopping cart object and add the item to it.
   

2. B.First check it the user has a shopping cart object. If not you create one.
   

It seems that all to often developers find it quicker to implement option A. which reports and error in the error logs.

The second option may take a little longer to implement but it doesn’t throw an error.

Throwing an error in option A. may be a valid scenario, but since it is obviously an expected behavior there is no way that throwing an “error” is an acceptable outcome. Instead this sort of message should be a warning or information message that’s if it should be reported at all.