Wednesday, February 11, 2009

Windows is like that

Right before our last scheduled upgrade, one of the staging servers in the UK started acting badly. It was confused between the US date format, MM/DD/YYYY and the UK format, DD/MM/YYYY. All during testing on both sides of the Atlantic everything was fine. The server's identical twin in the farm had no such confusion. We double checked the windows regional settings, the config files, the C# code, and found no problems.
Out of desperation we restarted the web server, IIS. The sun broke through the clouds, birds were singing, and all was right with the world. The box was no longer confused about transatlantic dates. We did nothing but restart IIS. It was very scary.
After additional testing we did the upgrade and everything is fine. Which reminds me of a Haiku:

Yesterday it worked.
Today it is not working.
Windows is like that.

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