They call me "LoadPicture Lippert"

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As
promised, my least customer impactful bug ever. "urn:schemas-microsoft-com:office:office" />

VBScript
version 1.0 was written by one of the VB compiler devs, one of those uber-productive
guys who implements compilers on the weekend for fun. It
was implemented and tested extremely rapidly, and as a result, a few of the less important
methods in the VB runtime were not ported to the VBScript runtime. My
first task as a full timer at Microsoft was to add the missing functions to VBScript
2.0.

On
August 5th, 1996, I implemented LoadPicture, which, as you might imagine, extracts
a picture from a storage. Here's a scrap
of the code I wrote:

IDispatch
* pdisp;

// [...
open storage and stream ...]

hresult
= OleLoadPicture( pstream, 0, TRUE, IID_IPicture, (void **)&pdisp );

Did
I mention that I'd been writing COM code for all of two weeks at the time?

There's
a boneheaded bug there. I'm asking for
an IPicture and
assigning the result to an IDispatch. This
is going to crash and burn the moment anyone tries to call any method on that picture
object because the vtable is going to be completely horked.
I've violated one of the Fundamental Rules of COM. The fact that this bad code
shipped to customers indicates that:

*
Most seriously, I did not adequately test it before I checked it in

*
my mentors did not adequately review the code

*
the test team did not adequately test it before it shipped to customers

Those
are all bad, and I am happy to say that today we are much, much more hard-core about
peer-reviewing, self-testing, buddy-testing, and tester-testing code before it goes
to customers than we were seven years ago.

But
there is a silver lining of a sort -- obviously no one at Microsoft bothered
to run this code after I wrote it. But neither
did any customers. We didn't get
a bug report on this thing until February
of 1998. This thing was in the wild
for almost a year and a half before someone noticed that it was completely, utterly
broken! No one really cared.

The
next day the name plate on my office door said "LoadPicture Lippert". Ha
ha ha, very funny guys.