Strangely enough, last week, I installed Microsoft's Visual Studio 2008 and instead of it running in 64K, the compressed ISO alone was almost 4 gigabytes. Talk about bloat. But like the C compiler of old, Visual Studio has a symbolic debugger -- and as a programmer, I love debuggers.

Notes, of course, also has a debugger. And while I love debuggers, there's one thing I don't like: when debuggers have bugs. If you've been attempting to debug LotusScript, particularly a piece of LotusScript with shared fields, you may have noticed that the Notes debugger itself needs a little debugging.

In my experience, the code stepper doesn't always step through the code. I've found that sometimes it'll skip form events, sometimes it'll skip subform events and it also might skip events with shared fields.

This is not a new problem. Although I no longer have a Notes 5 installation on anything, I do have some VM images of Notes 6.0, 6.5, 7.0, and 8.0. The problem occurs on all of them. I was hoping 8.5 would fix the problem, but no such joy.

There is one way to diagnose the problem. If you're trying to single-step your way through code, check to see if you have any shared fields. If you do, then you might want to consider using a standard field -- which the debugger will actually debug.

It's actually not that frustrating -- once you know what to look for.

David Gewirtz is the author of How To Save Jobs and Where Have All The Emails Gone? For more than 20 years, he has analyzed current, historical, and emerging issues relating to technology, competitiveness, and policy. David is the Editor-in-Chief of the ZATZ magazines, is the Cyberterrorism Advisor for the International Association for Counterterrorism and Security Professionals, and is a member of the instructional faculty at the University of California, Berkeley extension. He can be reached at david@zatz.com and you can follow him at http://www.twitter.com/DavidGewirtz.