Incorrect Windows 8 error message change!

I’ve been pretty happy with moving to Windows 8. I’ve got used to the “new” UI, it was a pretty painless transition once I learned the new shortcut keys and I actually think that the new “start menu” is better, you don’t have to worry about complicated trees of folders, it’s all flat and you just start typing the name of what you want… So for me, a developer with two monitors and no touch interface using the desktop pretty much as I always have done, Windows 8 works well.

In fact, the biggest upset for me so far has been that some bright spark decided to change an error message for my locale… The message for WSAESHUTDOWN has changed from “A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket had already been shut down in that direction with a previous <b>shutdown</b> call.” to “A request to send or receive data was disallowed because the socket had already been shut down in that direction with a previous <b>shut-down</b> call.”. Now, apart from the new message being incorrect, it’s not a “shut-down” it was a call to shutdown(), the change has broken some of my (possibly too invasive and therefore fragile) tests!

I have unit tests for The Server Framework and they test all manner of things, including what gets passed to the error callbacks. One of these tests is testing what happens when you issue a read after a socket has been shutdown… I now have to allow either error message, which is easy for me to do but it’s annoying since the new message is actually incorrect!