This is weird but everytime I go to a conference and somebody speaks about Web Apps they always talk about why people should use custom errors instead of throwing the Yellow Page of Death. Just this morning I went to the ASP.NET website to check on the forums and this is what was displayed on my screen:
Huh? No custom errors? Hmmm.. seems like they are breaking their own rules.
Anyway, A friend of mine had this joke exception code that slipped to their production and one of the accountants called him and was very scared because she thought she made a huge mistake.
Yikes! It was mean. Even if its a joke it is really mean. Striking fear to your users is not a good thing at all. If they had a custom error page then this would not have happened.
This reminded me of the IKEA incident I saw from D'Arcy Lussier a few days ago.
Custom errors gives the easy feeling to the users. It doesn't scare them to death and it makes them more comfortable with your system knowing that it can recover from such a fatal crash.
Oh well, I'm just glad I got this baby showing up at devpinoy ;)