Visual Studio crash when choosing items in the Forms designer toolbox

Posted on February 25, 2009 by Johan Appelgren

Ran into a strange issue with Visual Studio 2008 SP1 where it crashed, vanished with no errors, if I selected the Choose items menu item in the context menu of the Windows Forms designer Toolbox window. Attaching a debugger and reproducing the crash gave me the following error.

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.617 2009 (GMT+1): CLR:(

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.617 2009 (GMT+1): C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations\3.5.0.0__31bf3856ad364e35\System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.618 2009 (GMT+1): )

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.618 2009 (GMT+1): Rejecting native image because dependency C:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\System.Core\3.5.0.0__b77a5c561934e089\System.Core.dll is not native

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.619 2009 (GMT+1):

Wed Feb 25 15:47:55.619 2009 (GMT+1): ModLoad: 00000000`5aee0000 00000000`5aef2000 Â System.ComponentModel.DataAnnotations.dll

I have no idea what has caused this, but closing all Visual Studio instances and then starting it once with the /safemode switch and then closing it seems to have fixed the crash.

It’s not a bug, it’s by design

Posted on March 30, 2007 by Johan Appelgren

When I changed the clock from winter to summertime on my SE k750i the calendar did not behave as expected. All events were moved one hour. I contacted Sony Ericsson Call Center about the problem and yesterday I got a response, this behavior is in the specification for the SE k750i. How stupid is that? I don’t care if they designed a bug on purpose or not. It causes problems for me, and I’d guess anyone else that uses the calendar on a k750i.

Update: After a few mails back and forth they’ve at least provided me with a workaround. Always sync the calendar with a computer and do a sync that overwrites the phone after each change between summer- and wintertime. Brilliant!

Trouble accessing support.microsoft.com

Posted on February 28, 2007 by Johan Appelgren

I’ve had some trouble accessing http://support.microsoft.com lately and thought it had to do with me using Firefox, since it worked just fine when using Internet Explorer. I got an uninformative ASP.NET runtime error.

Server Error in ‘/’ Application.

Runtime Error

But after reading this thread at channel9 I cleared all cookies from the microsoft.com domain and now I can access http://support.microsoft.com again.

No Live! with Assault Heroes?

Posted on December 25, 2006 by Johan Appelgren

Bought Assault Heroes on Live Arcade a couple of days ago and it’s a blast. Simple shoot’em’up that both plays and looks great.

Unfortunately I haven’t been able to get as much fun out of it as I’d like. Renewed my Live Gold account a few days ago and wanted to try playing Assault Heroes with a friend online. We managed to connect to each other just fine but after the loading was done the game got stuck on the waiting screen for both of us indefinitely. Same thing happens if I try a quick start with some random player.
When I e-mailed Microsoft’s Xbox support all I got was that I had to call them for them to be able to solve the issue, and when I did that they couldn’t help me at the call center either because they did not have the full version of the game available. Sounds somewhat weird to me. I’m supposed to try calling them again tomorrow, hopefully I’ll get a more helpfull answer then..

Crappy code now available on Live Arcade!

Posted on March 19, 2006 by Johan Appelgren

Wanted to try the The Outfit demo and the Feeding Frenzy demo but ran into a little problem. These two Xbox 360 games only work using PAL-60 when using the standard definition output, so if the Xbox 360 is set to PAL-50 the two games refuse to start. When using the high definition output, as I am, the Xbox detects this and do not allow changing from PAL-50 to PAL-60. So it looks like I wont be able to try these two games for now. Don’t know if it is an error in the Xbox 360 or these two games, but I hope it is fixed soon!

Looks like I’m not the only one using the high definition output, schrankmonster wrote about exactly the same issue a few days ago.

Update: The new game AstroPop has the same annoying problem.

Xbox 360 crash

Posted on February 8, 2006 by Johan Appelgren

My Xbox 360 crashed for the first time yesterday. Or more accurately, the game I was playing froze. On some level it is understandable since I was playing a original Xbox game, Halo 2, but still very annoying. Apparently Halo 2 only saves to the harddrive when you “quit and save” the game so all my progress made during that session was lost. Argh!

Luckily the second time through the same part of the game it worked just fine. So it looks like I’ll finally be able to finish Halo 2 and get to see the ending everyone has been complaining about. 🙂

Apart from yesterdays crash the only noticeable difference when playing Halo 2 on the Xbox 360 are some graphical glitches, the background gets stuck and is overlayed over the foreground in some areas of the game. So overall I’m quite impressed by the backwards compatibility of at least this title.