Justin: For "security" reasons, I'm not quoting or
pointing to anything.
No need ot offend someone personally.
It's just somethign I needed to write.
Thanks for the pointer to Tapuz!
Roy.
This suggests to me that you've not spent much time
trying to answer questions in forums.
In my experience, when someone asks a bizarre-looking
and highly specific question, then 99 times out of 100
it's because they're on completely the wrong track.
It's a very widely recognized pattern - someone thinks
they have half-solved a problem, and just need the other
half of the solution, when in fact the most appropriate
full solution would not incorporate any of what they've
got in their 'half solution'.
Often, the only way to distinguish between this 99% case
and the 1% of cases where the question is in fact on the
right track is to ask for more context.
Moreover, failure to supply context seems to be more
common amongst newbies than experienced people.
So if you're in the 1% where you really do need an
answer to a peculiar question, just supply some context
up front. That way you instantly distinguish yourself
from the newbies, and make it clear that you are in the
1%.
So given that the "let's step back and look at the big
picture" approach is the correct one 99% of the time,
and you've apparently not done anything to identify
yourself as being in the other 1%, you shouldn't be
surprised at this response.
And it's not people being high and mighty. It's simply
that if you spend a lot of time helping people in
forums, you rapidly learn that the "big picture"
approach is the fastest way to help the majority of
people. (Indeed, for the 99% where this works best,
you'd actively be doing them a disservice if you tried
to answer the question literally.)
To call it arrogance is your characterization. I think
it's a misleading description.
@Roy,
I often enough get questions from smart people that just
doesn't make sense without the context in which they are
working.
To give a simple example, I was asked why they had
problems with corruption of cached objects. The issue
was mutliply threads touching the same objects which was
not thread safe. Gettting there was a long route, since
the caching issue itself didn't come until I dug into it
(the original question was: "under load, stuff breaks")
Also, often enough, the question may be senseless.
I was asked (by a senior architect!) to give him a
WebMsgBox, with the same properties of the windows one
(i.e, the code should stop and wait for reply).
I understand the frustration in asking the question and
getting more questions in return, but remember that
while _you_ have all the context, the one trying to
answer the question doesn't.
Even with the context, it may not be obvious.
Even when the question is reasonable and by a
knowledgable guy, you may still need bigger picture
stuff.
I get a lot of question with Rhino Mocks that turn out
to be object identity issues, but I can't figure it out
until I see the code that does this.
There is a link to the left of this box - VB.NET blogs
on MSDN - would be nice if it didn't produce an error.