我曾经想出了一个我认为很优雅的解决方案来解决一个特别棘手的问题，现在回想起来，这有点令人费解，并且大量使用了宏编程。多年以后，我从一个维护程序员那里发现了这条评论

/*
    Description: The Total Perspective Vortex derives its picture of the
                 whole Universe  on the principle of extrapolated matter
                 analyses.

                 To  explain  -  since every piece of matter in the Universe
                 is in some way affected by every other piece of matter in
                 the  Universe,  it  is  in  theory possible to extrapolate
                 the whole of creation - every sun, every planet, their
                 orbits, their composition and their economic and social
                 history from, say, one small Macro.

                 The man who invented the Total Perspective Vortex did so
                 basically in order to annoy the IT department.

                 Steve Weet - for that was his name - was a dreamer, a
                 thinker, a speculative philosopher or, as some would have
                 it, a slacker.

                 And they would nag him incessantly about the utterly
                 inordinate amount of time he spent staring out into space,
                 or mulling over the mechanics of Chelsea FC, or doing
                 spectrographic analyses of macros.

                 "Have  some  sense  of  proportion!"  they would say,
                 sometimes as often as thirty-eight times in a single day.

                 And so he built the Total Perspective Vortex - just to show
                 them.

                 And into one end he plugged the whole of reality as
                 extrapolated  from one  macro, and into the other
                 end he plugged the IT department: so that when he turned it
                 on they saw in one instant the whole infinity of creation 
                 and theirselves in relation to it.

                 To  Steve Weet's horror, the shock completely annihilated '
                 their brains; but to his satisfaction he realized that he
                 had proved conclusively that if life is going to exist in a
                 Universe of this size, then the one thing it cannot afford
                 to have is a sense of proportion.

*/

// Holy moses! I've never seen anything so ridiculous in all my life. 

// Why do we need to query the AlarmIDs table twice.

// Please tell me sir; I would really like to know. 

// This like all the other services have been mangled

// to the point where they are nearly impossible to determine what kind of side affects might occur.

// I am making the smallest changes I can to this code. 

// The GetAlarmId method gets the alarm id from the AlarmIDs table.

// Novel idea, why didn't we query for the values be get below all in the same place.

// This should be changed, but right now it will have to remain as is due to time constraints.

// This like all other services really don't do anything fantastically hard, but after the original coders got

// done with them; they are difficult to work with and have an acceptable comfort level.

// I have to find a better job

Catch (Exception e) {
 //who cares?
} 

大概30页的xslt的中间部分

<!-- Here be dragons  -->

/// <summary>
/// The possible outcomes of an update operation (save or delete)
/// </summary>
public enum UpdateResult
{

    /// <summary>
    /// Updated successfully
    /// </summary>
    Success = 0,

    /// <summary>
    /// Updated successfully
    /// </summary>
    Failed = 1
}