I have spent several hours of hair pulling trying to understand and fix a bug in the Silverlight application I am working on.

The application gets it’s data from some WCF web services, the first of which works just fine; however no mater what I did I kept hitting Silverlight’s very unhelpful error message – "The remote server returned an error: NotFound"; As I said I spent literally hours trying to get to the bottom of this, researching the web and trying all the suggestions I found without success:

 

Then I found this blog entry and did what it said – then I kicked myself and when I got up kicked myself again;

 

I have been developing for something like 25 years and, even if I do say so myself, I’m not bad at it – I cannot remember the number of times, as a Software Development Manager, I gave this advice to my team:-

 

REMEMBER THE BASICS – I am not shouting, I am screaming at myself;

 

The problem had nothing to do with Silverlight or my web service directly – I had forgotten to put a primary key on a database table so my code fell over trying to update it. In other words I had not tested my service code to make sure it was working correctly before I tried to use it. – no good saying I was in a hurry; it ended up costing me far more time than I saved;

 

Back to Basics then  Thanks Ian for reminding me.