When the option becomes so second-nature you forget that it’s an option

Raymond Chen

A user of the imaginary Program Q program wanted to write an automated test that created a table, then ran various sub-test which communicated among each other by updating that table.

When my test tries to create a table, the program asks the following question:

q install server -r testdb

Setting up this machine to be a registered table server…
Registered table servers must adhere to Microsoft information 
security policies. See http://programq/policy for details.
If you have questions, contact mailto:qpolicy.
Do you agree to adhere to Microsoft policies regarding
registered table servers (y/n/q)?

Is there a way to suppress the question? I can’t pre-create a single server that all the tests connect to, because multiple tests running simultaneously would end up colliding with each other. I would prefer that each test run on its own isolated table server, but when I try to install a table server on the machine being tested, I get the above prompt.

Why not just create an unregistered table server instead? Just leave off the -r flag. Give your problem description, there appears to be no need for the table server to be registered.

Ah, didn’t know about the ability to create an unregistered server. Works great!

The user was apparently so accustomed to creating registered table servers that he didn’t realize that there was any other kind. My guess is that he had no idea what the -r flag did; he just cargo-culted it from somewhere.

Remember: The target audience for Program Q is not non-technical end-users. The target audience is other programmers, and this person was clearly a programmer since he was writing an automated test!

Raymond Chen

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