For example:

Rather than:

I would write:

And voila! it works just fine.

The next failed piece of upgraded code was this

In this case you need to add two more parameters, an 'XMLResolver' and an 'evidence' param. This worked:

Evil Moral of the story is:

If a parameter is required, but you don't know why, just set it to 'nothing.'

That's not the sort of lesson I'd like to teach people. But it's what Microsoft taught me today.

Third situation was a bit trickier and called for an even nastier hack.

This worked in version 1.0, but threw a warning in 1.1:

The warning was a familiar one:

My first thought was: 'add a new parameter, value of nothing'. But this failed because the compiler couldn't resolve which overloaded interface I was after. The result of such an approach was:

i.e., 'Sure you want nothing -- but what type of nothing??' Fair cop, so I tried this instead:

Now there were no warnings and it did compile. But did it work? Who cares? Because right then i thought of a cleverer and nastier solution, that would be bound to confuse other developers. Naturally, I gravitated toward it immediately:

I didn't test that it worked, because 'hey, it should, right?'

At that moment, another, nastier solution occurred to me. I call this one: "What type of 'nothing'? **This** type of nothing!"

No time to test it, but the compiler doesn't freak, so my money says she works.

And now I can get on with writing other, better, faster bugs.

As an old friend said to me just yesterday: "One man's bug is another man's paycheck."