Scott Hanselman has the interesting tendency to run into the weirdest debugging problems.

When I worked at Solien, I had the same talent for uncovering strange bugs. My CTO at the time said I had the “Gift Finger” which is German for “Poison Finger”. My blessing (or curse) was the anti-Midas touch in software. Code that seemed to work just fine would suddenly collapse in a flying mess of runtime errors when I took a look at it.

Fortunately, I was as good at tracking down the root causes of bugs as I was in coaxing them out of hiding. In a similar vein, Scott describes a harrowing account of some in depth detective work he did to track down a particularly tricky bug. Reading his account felt like watching a good Columbo episode. He really does give it the pacing and tension of a good detective story.

That gave me an idea. Why not try to aggregate some great “Debugging Detective Stories”? Scott suggested the name “CSI:ASP Debugging”. I don’ know if such a thing would warrant a published book (or a TV pilot), but at the least, I could collect some on my blog here. So if you have a great story of debugging a particularly nasty bug, post it in the comments of this post or post it on your own blog and link to this one.

As for me, I don’ have any good debugging stories off the top of my head since, as an independent contractor, I no longer have coworkers to introduce bugs to the code. ;)

Yes, I am kidding.