How not to handle exceptions!

Was trying to pay my Electricity bill online via a site called Bangalore One , which is the Governments, premier one-stop shop for Electronic Delivery of Citizen Services.

I could not pay because it seems like some backend services they need for credit card payment is down. How do I know this? Because the site is revealing too much detail! See the exception details pasted below.

This is a great example of what not to do! I have seen this often, and it is lazy developers and even lazier testers who approved this and get this into production. One would have thought that government managing the “Silicon Valley of India” would know better!

It is also interesting to see that they are on a very old version of .NET - running on v1.1.

Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

Description: An unhandled exception occurred during the execution of the current web request. Please review the stack trace for more information about the error and where it originated in the code.

Exception Details: System.Exception: Timeout expired. The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.

Source Error: An unhandled exception was generated during the execution of the current web request. Information regarding the origin and location of the exception can be identified using the exception stack trace below.

Stack Trace:

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[Exception: Timeout expired.  The timeout period elapsed prior to completion of the operation or the server is not responding.]
   BangaloreOne.clsBESCOM.fnCheckTransCnt(String LocationRRNo, String StaffCode, Int32 intDeptCode) +381
   bOneWebPortal.BESCOMConfirm.Page_Load(Object sender, EventArgs e) +721
   System.Web.UI.Control.OnLoad(EventArgs e) +67
   System.Web.UI.Control.LoadRecursive() +35
   System.Web.UI.Page.ProcessRequestMain() +750

Version Information: Microsoft .NET Framework Version:1.1.4322.2300; ASP.NET Version:1.1.4322.2300