Almost no one who reads this is a programmer of any kind, so this will mean very little to you. But I just have to say that I spent the last 2-1/2 hours trying to debug a type problem in a C# .NET application I am working on. I added a cool feature that allowed a table of dates to be edited inline from the browser, but when the date was submitted to the database, I kept getting an exception indicating that the string could not be converted to a datetime. I tried different approaches. I made little tweaks. I scoured the InterWeb. Nothing was working and yet I was confident that the value I was passing was a datetime value.

I was about to give up and go to lunch when a stray thought struck me. Maybe the value is a datetime, but maybe the parameter which I am setting using the value is not a datetime. I checked, and sure enough that was it. Someone, in the hours of frustration, I had swapped the order of two lines of code. That was all that was wrong and all of my frustration and fruitless attempts were for naught, if only I had recognized this change 2 hours ago.

I’m going to lunch now…