Sometimes bugs just will not "repro"

One of the most frustrating ways a bug can be resolved is "Not Repro." What this means is that we receive a bug report but that no matter what we try, we cannot get the bug to reproduce (repro) again. The frustrating part is that we know the bug happened, but we simply cannot determine what about was the trigger.

I hit one of these on Monday. If you look through the comments on my posting, you will see that Kathy did not get the link to Jason's blog to appear when she read the article. This was kind of odd for me to see. I had created the original article in OneNote (naturally) and had made sure the link was added to the first sentence. Then I copied the entire bit of text to the clipboard and pasted into Live Writer and used that to post to my blog. I've done this many times before and had never had a problem so I was wondering why the link did not survive.

First, I checked the obvious - whether I had actually added links to OneNote. I had, they existed and worked fine. I copied the text again to the clipboard and pasted to Live Writer. Again, the links were there. I pasted to Word as a second check - again, all was well.

Then I tried a separate machine, a different OS, adding images along with the text, links only, URLS, etc… to see if I could get this to happen again. I never could. In every test, everything worked fine. I started checking the data on the clipboard and in every case, the link data was there.

So I'm left in the uncomfortable position of knowing I had seen a bug, but cannot make it happen again. I'll keep my eye out for it, but other than that, there is no more I can do to force this to happen.  (And yes, I triple checked the "Monday" link above when I posted this article).

Like I said, this is frustrating…

Questions, comments, concerns and criticisms always welcome,

John