I had the opportunity to assist one of my co-workers today in troubleshooting a web service + Silverlight client I had built for a customer a while back. The combination of the two enables users to upload large files to a server over intermittent internet connections. My co-worker mentioned that she got an error message in a message box from the Silverlight client stating that something was wrong with the parameters sent to it.

In the end it turns out that the parameter for the maximum file size allowed to upload had been set to 3 GB. The specification I received when building this stated that the maximum file size that the system should be able to handle would not exceed 1 GB. So I figured a regular int would suffice for managing the maximum file size restriction.

So what this malconfiguration gave was that the Silverlight client tried to stuff the value of 3GB into an int – this is a no go. My co-worker is not to blame for this, she just got this particular setup handed to her from someone else.

What you specify is what you get.