Today hasn’t been a great day:

  • I spent 45 minutes stood at the station only to find out that one inch of snow in enough to stop a train. Trains which of course run four inch above the ground on iron tracks.
  • I’m in the middle of the project from hell where some developers have thrown WSS, Biztalk, K2 and a shed load of custom code into a mixing pot without any consideration to how it’ll work in production (“it works on our dev server” – “your dev server is a single box with everything running under one admin account” – “so?”) or how it’ll be supported.
  • My uncle got taken to hospital so I’ve spent all evening with my grandma holding back the tears.
  • My puppy left me a present in the kitchen.

So why am I taking the time to write a post after such a rubbish day? Because I finally got to put a six month old problem to bed.

“I cannot edit the properties or text of the first post in a discussion forum. When I click edit I get ’an unknown error has occurred’. I can edit all other posts.“

When this bug was first reported our support guys went through the usual process of checking ULS logs, event logs etc but everything was clear. This was the only one of our four farms to show the behaviour and Google was disappointingly unhelpful. We were left with little choice but to engage PSS. More log checks, reproducing the error (which Microsoft were finding hard), SQL traces – you name it, but almost six months later and it appeared MS were as stumped as we were.

Then today, out of the blue they fired over an e-mail to say it was a bug that’d be introduced with SP1 and fixed with the infrastructure update.(we’d put fixes on hold while we ironed out some of the outstanding PSS cases.) I installed it into a dev system and sure enough, the problem went away.

It’s slightly embarrassing to say I sat on a bug for six months when a standard maintenance fix could have removed it, but I’m in a glass half full mood so I’m going look at it as a problem solved.