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.