Importance of Error Messages

Posted Friday, April 09, 2004 2:05 AM by CumpsD
.NET gave me an error... A 'Catastrophic failure'.

What's this? Did somebody ran out of inspiration? Every failure is bad! Should I now throw error messages at users stating:
  • Disastrous failure.
  • Terrible failure.
  • Awful failure.
  • Dreaded failure.
One of my hard disks crashed two days ago. That is a catastrophic failure!

To read more on error messages, check this: A Review of Error Messages. Make sure to think about your error messages you're giving your users!
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Comments

# re: Importance of Error Messages

Thursday, April 08, 2004 8:17 PM by Shannon J Hager

I got that for the first time a couple weeks ago. It sounded horrible, I expected VS to shut down or something...

# re: Importance of Error Messages

Thursday, April 08, 2004 10:02 PM by Addy Santo

There is an implied second half to that message, which can be interpreted in a number of different ways depending on your mental state:

Catastrophic Failure: Time to go home,
Catastrophic Failure: Time to go to sleep,
Catastrophic Failure: Time to reboot,
etc.

:)




# re: Importance of Error Messages

Friday, April 09, 2004 4:56 AM by Fabrice

This stupid message has been around since COM at least, and unfortunately not fixed yet.

# re: Importance of Error Messages

Friday, April 09, 2004 8:00 AM by David Cumps

I encountered it with a VS add-in, VSNunit in particular. It looked worse then a blue screen to me, I expected my computer to get totally locked up. Luckily it did absolutely nothing :)

# re: Importance of Error Messages

Wednesday, April 14, 2004 11:13 AM by Fabrice

This makes sense as VS add-ins are COM objects.

# re: Importance of Error Messages

Friday, April 16, 2004 9:27 AM by Rudi

ok, I'm gonna be harsh here but your message:

.NET gave me an error... A 'Catastrophic failure'.

doesn't tell us much either, now does it? how can .NET give you an error? Who/what is .NET? Is she pretty, I know its sexy, but what do you think?

ok, just kidding...

honestly, regarding error messages, it is considered good practice to have a clean simple message stating the 'task' that could not be completed and possible remediation. As important is that there is a configurable way to log the error with sufficient details and that the log is written in a secured way.

The log:
As such Helpdesk/Admin/Devs can find out more information and escalate to the correct person, with sufficient details.
In a secured way:
Imagine a malicious user finding out all sorts of details about your application; database connectionstrings with password are common and well, catastrophic; just open an app, rip out the network cable and play around...; I personally know of several cases where people got access to information they should not see because they encountered a verbose error message.

Be sure to visit our Security Summit (http://www.microsoft.be/securitysummit.)

# re: Importance of Error Messages

Friday, April 16, 2004 9:50 AM by David Cumps

Yes, I read that in 'writing secure code' as well :) never reveal too much info in an error message.

But that error message just confused me big time, it sounds terrible, and it isn't 'catastrophic' after all. It confused me because I've never seen an error like that. Most simple errors go 'Action Failed.' or 'Task Failed', but never 'Catastrophic' ;)