News
April Fool's Bug May Hamper Visual C++
- By Scott Bekker
- 01/14/1999
Apps Developers dreaming of the day they can kiss the Year 2000 bug goodbye may now have another date to look forward to -- April 1, 2001. That particular April Fool's Day coincides with the start of Daylight Savings Time -- and that coincidence could affect a number of applications created using a particular date function that ships with Microsoft's Visual C++ development suite.
Daylight Savings Time always begins on the first Sunday of April. But for some reason, when it falls on April 1, one of Visual C++'s local time functions will fail to take the one-hour time change into affect, according to Chris Hargarten, Microsoft's product manager for Visual C++. "We failed to properly calculate the difference for daylight savings," he explains. The application should begin to recognize the time change about a week later, Hargarten adds.
Applications that use the local time function from the Microsoft Foundation Classes (MFC), which rely on the Win32 API, will not be affected by the bug, Hargarten says, adding that 75 percent of developers who use Visual C++ typically use MFCs to build their applications. Microsoft is also working on a fix for the problem, so these applications could still make it through April Fool's Day 2001without a hitch. -- Michele Rosen, Staff Reporter/New York Correspondent
About the Author
Scott Bekker is editor in chief of Redmond Channel Partner magazine.