Summary

As I said at the beginning of this chapter, mistakes will happen, especially if you are a beginner. Remember learning to ride a bike? You probably don't remember falling off, but I bet you did. Luckily mistakes while learning to code are less painful (and there are none of those complaints from your Mom about grazed knees, or muddy clothes again). However, not all mistakes will be yours, so the process includes coping with other people as well. This may be code supplied by another person, or just user input – either way you should make sure you can handle whatever is thrown at you.

This means not only protecting your interface and code, but also knowing how to track down problems. A long time ago I once spent three days trying to track down an obscure bug in someone else's code. It's very easy to spend lots of time on things like this, which is bad for two reasons. Firstly it's very frustrating, especially as a learner. Hitting a problem sometimes seems like a high brick wall, and you wonder if you'll ever get over it, or can even be bothered to. Secondly, when working to a schedule, you can easily slip because of simple mistakes.

So in this chapter we've looked at some of the areas where problems can be caused, and shown how to get around them. Now it's time to get on with more exciting coding, by looking at the data features of Web Matrix.