In an attempt to minimize the chances that this can occur, this book will always work with fixed versions/builds of any third-party component that can be handled using the configuration files. However, some of them, such as Visual Studio and/or .NET framework updates, might be out of that scope and might bring havoc to the project. The source code might cease to work, or Visual Studio can suddenly be unable to properly compile it.

When something like that happens, the less experienced reader will always be tempted to put the blame on the book itself. Some of them may even start thinking something like this:

Alternatively, they may think like this:

There can be many other things like these.

It goes without saying that such hypotheses are hardly true, especially considering the amount of time that the authors, editors, and technical reviewers of these books spent in writing, testing, and refining the source code before building it up, making it available on GitHub and even publishing a working instance of the resulting application to a worldwide-available public website.

Any non-amateur developer will easily understand that most of these things couldn't even be done if there was some "broken code" somewhere; there's no way this book can even attempt to hit the shelves unless it comes with a 100% working source code, except for few possible minor typos that will quickly be reported to the publisher and thus fixed within the GitHub repository in a short while. In the unlikely case that it looks like it doesn't, such as raising unexpected compile errors, the non-novice reader should spend a reasonable amount of time trying to understand the root cause. Here's a list of questions they should try to answer before anything else:

• Am I using the same development framework, third-party libraries, versions, and builds adopted by the book?
• If I updated something because I felt like I needed to, am I aware of the changes that might affect the source code? Did I read the relevant change logs? Have I spent a reasonable amount of time looking around for breaking changes and/or known issues that could have had an impact on the source code?
• Is the book's GitHub repository also affected by this issue? Did I try to compare it with my own code, possibly replacing mine?