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.

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.

Broken Live Messenger ads

Posted on February 20, 2007 by Johan Appelgren

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.

Live Messenger ad

No more Vista startup chime

Posted on September 25, 2006 by Johan Appelgren

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

Vista startup chime

Posted on August 26, 2006 by Johan Appelgren

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.