Andre has inherited a rather antique ASP .Net WebForms application. It's a large one, with many pages in it, but they all follow a certain pattern. Let's see if you can spot it.

protected void btnSearch_Click(object sender, EventArgs e)
{
    ArrayList paramsRel = new ArrayList();
    paramsRel["Name"] = txtNome.Text;
    paramsRel["Date"] = txtDate.Text;
    Session["paramsRel"] = paramsRel;
   
    List<Client> clients = Controller.FindClients();
    //Some other code
}

Frequently in programming, we can make a tradeoff: use less (or more) CPU in exchange for using more (or less) memory. Lookup tables are a great example: use a big pile of memory to turn complicated calculations into O(1) operations.

So, for example, implementing itoa, the C library function for turning an integer into a character array (aka, a string), you could maybe make it more efficient using a lookup table.

Alexandar sends us some C# date handling code. The best thing one can say is that they didn't reinvent any wheels, but that might be worse, because they used the existing wheels to drive right off a cliff.

try
{
    var date = DateTime.ParseExact(member.PubDate.ToString(), "M/d/yyyy h:mm:ss tt", null); 
    objCustomResult.PublishedDate = date;
}
catch (Exception datEx)
{
}

"Don't use exception handling for normal flow control," is generally good advice. But Andy's lead had a PhD in computer science, and with that kind of education, wasn't about to let good advice or best practices tell them what to do. That's why, when they needed to validate inputs, they wrote code C# like this:

    public static bool IsDecimal(string theValue)
    {
        try
        {
            Convert.ToDouble(theValue);
            return true;
        }
        catch
        {
            return false;
        }
    } 

Early in my career, I had the misfortune of doing a lot of Crystal Reports work. Crystal Reports is another one of those tools that lets non-developer, non-database savvy folks craft reports. Which, like so often happens, means that the users dig themselves incredible holes and need professional help to get back out, because at the end of the day, when the root problem is actually complicated, all the helpful GUI tools in the world can't solve it for you.

Michael was in a similar position as I was, but for Michael, there was a five alarm fire. It was the end of the month, and a bunch of monthly sales reports needed to be calculated. One of the big things management expected to see was a year-over-year delta on sales, and they got real cranky if the line didn't go up. If they couldn't even see the line, they went into a full on panic and assumed the sales team was floundering and the company was on the verge of collapse.