Case of Missing Font

Once upon a time I was Visual Basic 6 programmer. These days one of those applications needed small update. I did change within five minutes, compiled it (in P-code because it doesn't work when compiled as Native - but that is another story) and deployed it on network. Of course next day I got a call about a bug.

Barcode fonts

In those days it was hard to put barcode (Code 128 to be exact) on Data Report. Easiest path you could take was to use barcode font (or create it as I did) and store some textual representation of that code in database. When report is created, it would use that font to display text and by accident it would printout barcode. It wasn't elegant solution but it worked.

The Bug

Since I don't use same "barcode style" these days I hadn't had that font installed on my system. For one reason or another something happened during compile that caused application to forget about my barcode font defined in Data Report. It just used same font as for rest of page which caused big numbers (my encoding of barcode used quite few of them) to appear where barcode should be.

Solution was quite simple. I installed that font on my Vista (yes I know, bug may as well be because VB6 is not supported on Vista officially) and recompiled application. Everything was ok this time.

It left me wondering however. Are there any other bugs that I introduced by simple fact of recompiling application?

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