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   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.

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.

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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.

You’d think someone would at least test the ads that go out all Live Messenger users. Usually I don’t mind the ads in Live Messenger since they’re usually very unobtrusive, and I’ve never seen anything remotely interesting being advertised. But getting a script error dialog every time I restore Live Messenger is beyond annoying.

Microsoft has decided to add a mute option for the startup chime in newer builds of Vista.

Just read in Ed Bott’s blog that Windows Vista will include a startup sound that will always play when the computer has booted and you can login. Having a startup sound is fine, but having one that you cannot disable without hacking system dlls is not.

It almost sounds too crazy to be true.