Importance of Error Messages

Friday, April 9, 2004

.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!

4 Comments

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

Shannon J Hager - Friday, April 9, 2004 12:17:00 AM

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.

:)

Addy Santo - Friday, April 9, 2004 2:02:00 AM

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

Fabrice - Friday, April 9, 2004 8:56:00 AM

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

Fabrice - Wednesday, April 14, 2004 3:13:00 PM

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