Software errors, are so prevalent and so harmful that they cost the U.S. economy an estimated $59.5 billion annually. There are many examples of very serious and detrimental software errors such as:

• The Ariane 5, Explosion in 1996 (data conversion of a too large number).
• Mars Climate Orbiter in 1999 (Mixture of pounds and kilograms).
• Railway Signal Box Altona, Germany in 1995 (not enough memory).
• Radiation Deaths in 1985 (AECL Computer Errors).

Obviously, we would like to deliver a “bug free product” to our customers, but unfortunately, this is an un achievable goal. While some errors can be very easily eliminated, other are very evasive. What are the measures taken into consideration when we decide if an error is evasive or not? Lets create a list of software error parade and talk about it:

The sixth of the series of programming job interview challenge is out. Other then commenting the solution, I remind you that you can post the solution on your blog and get a link next week!

Here is the solution to the previous challenge:
Two-way merge sort (External Sorting) : The idea is breaking the big file into subfiles, sorting them and than merging them back together. In the first pass read one page at a time, the records in the page are sorted (quicksort for example) and the page is written back to disk. in subsequent passes, each pair of sorted output from the previous pass are read and merged to produce sorted subfile twice as long:

1. Read each page, Sort it, Write it back
2. while more than one sorted subfile:
while subfiles from previous pass left to merge:
- Choose next two subfiles from previous pass
- Read each subfile into a memory page (one page at a time)
- Merge the subfiles (remember each of them is already sorted), write output to a memory page
- Write output page to disk when needed.

We all know managed code can have memory leaks. You can find a good example here: A .NET memory leak you did not think about. Microsoft provides us with the CLR Profiler, an open source tool for analyzing the behavior of your managed application, which you can download here. It contains very good documentation about the different functions of the tool, however I still find it a bit hard to start with, so here is a simple step-by-step example of how to use it. After you finish downloadoing it , extract the files and open the directory. there you will find the manual, you can read it later… Navigate to CLRProfiler\Binaries\x86 (or x64) and run CLRProfiler.exe.