Today I am mostly...

Wrestling with other people's god-awful code. There is a rather neat feature in SQL Server which allows you to return a set of data as XML. It's very simple and as long as you write your query correctly, it just works. You can then read in this XML with your .NET application and generally piss about with it however you want. You'd think this might be a sensible course of action when building a feed to send to another company, but apparently that would be expecting too much. Instead we have a convoluted DAL, a contrived domain on top of that and several mappers and lookups and other assorted madness which does effectively the same job.

You might think that would be the end of the madness, but no, the whole (18MB) block of XML is then whizzed through the ether to a web service client. That might not be so bad if the client was in another building, on another continent, or some similar circumstance where a web service might be warranted, but no, the web service runs on exactly the same box. We waste roughly half an hour creating this XML, buggering about with it and then flinging it out, only to have it caught by a process running alongside the first one. Why, in God's name would any sane person do that?

I'm guilty of creating as many ugly babies as the next developer, but this has to go down in history as the most hideously deformed beastie I've ever seen.