In general, when writing code for handling the case for when something goes wrong, the programmer's natural instinct seems to be to just get over with it as soon as is possible and move on to other more exciting things. I speak, of course, from first hand experience. Now, there are a class of errors for which even the programmer is at a loss for providing guidance on what is an appropriate recourse, but really, if one is honest with oneself they are in truth few and far between. If you're willing to put in the effort required, more often than not, an error message that allows the end user to actually do something about the problem is only a few minutes and a few key strokes away.

I was working with SQL Server Management Studio Express edition today when I came across this error:

I present this as an example of a good error message. I knew exactly what I had to do to remedy the situation once I actually paid attention to what the message said (I admit, however, to having pig-headedly re-tried what I was trying to do a few times, unabashedly dismissing this message box every time, before admitting defeat and reading the message!). I did what this message box told me to do and the thing just worked! This might not sound like a big deal, but it makes me that little bit happier and as Joel puts it, these tiny victories tend to add up and contributes to one's feeling positively disposed towards the product at a subconcious level!

Quite suddenly, with no prior warning whatsoever, I resolved with firm determination that I will without further delay inflict upon unsuspecting world, my first screen recorded, poorly narrated technical tutorial. After many failed attempts with many miserable little screen capture programs, I finally managed to put something together using a trial edition of Camtasia which in my opinion is a stunningly useful piece of software if you dig this sort of impulsive screen recording fits. I just wish it didn't cost quite as much as it does.

The tutorial is a short 20 minute video that shows you how you can create an extremely simple, fairly useless workflow activity using the Windows Workflow Foundation (WF). It shows you how you can create a workflow that uses the activity and then how you can host the runtime and execute the workflow.

The Camtasia produced Flash file has been hosted on a site called Hot Link Files who in their boundless magnanimity allow basically everybody to host whatever they want on their servers and happily provide URLs to those files. Go Hot Link Files! They do have a clause however that they'll delete this file after 30 days of inactivity (note to self: figure out another cheap stingy way of hosting files and not spend American dollars).

[Update (22-Aug): I have since then changed my hosting provider and now have a gigabyte of disk space which is considerably more than the 20 MB that I used to scrounge with earlier and have therefore moved the SWF file for this movie on to my web server itself. It did cost American dollars though (dang!).]

Without further mindless blathering then, here's the tutorial. Oh, one more thing - unless you take great delight in squinting at the screen trying to make out extremely small text you might want to click the full-screen button on the video player below; you should find a small button that looks like a cross-hair on the bottom right hand corner of the player once you start playback and clicking it will hopefully launch the player in full-screen mode.