Today was developer frustration day.

I've furnished a specialized DLL to my customer to provide input/output capability. The DLL reads CSV files and writes data to a relational database.

The entire development process has been frustrating. The input files aren't fixed and the folks writing the files I process apparently aren't writing to the same specification I am using. As a result, I've had to add a lot of exception handling code for things like inconsistent trailing commas, missing columns, columns with different names, etc.

I recently delivered the component to my customer along with source code. I was notified that errors were generated. Several hours later, I tracked down that the error wasn't in my code, but upstream.

The problem is, everyone believes it's the other guy's code that is broken. No one steps through the code with a debugger.  I am sure there is a lesson to be learned in this episode.  Maybe I'll figure it out in the future and publish another story.

I can say that my hat is off to the folks at Microsoft.  They are able to seemlessly handle items like additional commas when reading a CSV file.