VS2008 has crashed 20+ times today. Reboots aren’t helping. I’m slowly uninstalling plug-ins at the moment. Ugh.
Obviously a Monday
A few days ago, I installed Visual Studio 2008 SP1 Beta and all the goodies that came along with that. Since then, printing just didn’t work. If I tried to print, it’d hang up the application for a few minutes (felt like hours) until it’d error out that the printer was not operational. I could print DIRECTLY from the printer (the test page). Meh.
Trust me, while trying to prototype a reporting application and print examples there is no happiness when you can’t print.
After several hours of hunting, testing drivers, trying fixes, etc… I finally came across a TOTALLY unrelated MS KB article, #948046.
The article is for Windows Server 2003 with SP2 and XP with SP2–-both x64 and x86 editions. It focuses on Microsoft Word and not being able to print if the EU Font pack is installed. The scenario of “Word document is not printed as expected” is pretty vague.
Now, I’ve been using the same HP printer drivers (an 8150 DN and 5550 DTN Color) for ages without any problems, so I can’t fathom that caused the problem, but who knows. The problem started after installing VS2008 SP1 Beta (I haven’t combed the install logs to see if it reinstalled Unidrv.dll).
Anyway, the fix to this problem, so far (after testing in several applications including Adobe Acrobat, Word, Excel, Visual Studio, and SQL Management Studio), is to download the hotfix in the #948046 article.
Install, reboot, and things work perfect.
I use Perfmon a LOT.
The logging and diagnostic software provided to us is, well, it’s just not that great. Very slow to use and get around and every time I want a specific counter, I have to go ask for it because it’s someone’s “job” to add those. Ugh. That’s no way to live.
Until now, I typically have a Perfmon console for each of my major application and SQL servers. Why? Because I was never smart enough to figure out how to add additional System Monitor controls into a single performance console.
Well, now I figured it out!
From here, you can either add counters manually or use this brilliant PowerShell script.
I’ve moved from the last beta up to release candidate 1 of FireFox 3 and am quite impressed. You can read all about the latest version here. FireFox opens up just as quick (if not quicker) on first run than IE 7 (on Vista).
NoScript, the latest del.icio.us, IETab, and Adblock Plus all work like a champ.
I also like the very compact theme that they’ve packaged with RC1–-Strata.
The coolest “tip” that I’ve found is the “Undo Close Tab”—did FireFox 2 have this? I need to look sometime. In the tab bar (when tabs are open or if you have it visible all the time), the “Undo Close Tab” reopens and rebrowses to wherever the last … well, closed tab was… brilliant for those times you accidently close the wrong tab!
I’ve browsed around a few dozen sights, dinked with some of the AJAX idea sides, and so far so good regarding rendering. I’m pleased with this release so far. 
Ever had an MSI file that you needed a library or something out of, but didn’t want to install it? Amazingly enough, you CAN get to those files.
The Windows Installer (msiexec.exe) can be ran at the command line to extract files directly using an administrative install.
How?
msiexec /a “YourMSIPackage.msi” /qb TARGETDIR=”DRIVE:\YourTargetPath”
Switches used:
/a – Administrative installation
/qb – Basic UI (simple GUI progress bar)
This is a lot easier than hacking it using WinRAR.
Anyone else having Windows Server 2003 throw up on FireFox 3b5 with DEP errors? I’ve excluded it for now, but it makes me a bit leery.
Somewhere, there’s a bit of irony here. I think Windows is just cranky that I have IE 7 disabled and have FireFox set as my default browser.
I decided to toss FireFox 3 on my workstation to see what broke—and unfortunately, almost everything broke.
I use quite a few add-ons; however, the most useful of my add-ons are all toast. 
There are a few that seem to survive; however, without FireBug and del.icio.us, I just can’t survive.
That aside, there is one very cool 3.0b5 add-on—IETab. The add-on uses filters and/or the context menus to open up Internet Explorer tabs within FireFox. Now, when browsing SharePoint Portal or other MSIE-only sites, I never have to leave FireFox. It’s FANTASTIC.
I hope that, by the time 3.0 is released out of beta and into production, that a few more of the add-on developers have spent the time and upgraded their tools. There are so many quality add-ons available (the biggest advantage, I think, to IE) that I had to see those fall behind.
The past few weeks, as I’ve further customized my FireFox installations at home and work, I’ve noticed one thing—FireFox has gotten slower and slower at work. My home computer is a monster that calculates the meaning of life in sheer moments; however, my office computer is a poor, dying Precision 670 that rattles and whimpers when VS2008 pegs the CPUs at 100%.
The other day, I started troubleshooting the slowdown.
Okay, but that’s no way to live. There had to be an answer and there is!
I stumbled across this today, but it appears that the issue lies not with the computer (well, not totally), but a great deal with our slow network and the “auto update” feature of Firefox.
By turning off the auto-updates, Firefox once again starts blazing fast.
Now, the trade-off, of course, is REMEMBERING and dealing with updating my add-ons myself. I wish Firefox only checked once a week, once a day, SOMETHING—not everytime the browser opens.
Is there a way to set that? Maybe.
If you browse to about:config in Firefox, you’re presented with the various settings. From there, filter with ‘update’.
There are a few preferences that may help :
So, a bit more information, but no definate answer.
For the past few months, I’ve “tolerated” Visual Studio 2008 crashing whenever I tried to do a Find/Replace. I’m not sure why… I just did.
Today, I set out and finally found a fix—it’s a known issue, but the patch hasn’t been widely distributed. The problem revolves around not Visual Studio, but Windows itself—any x64 bit version of Windows.
The full feedback submission on Microsoft Connect is available here.
The solution is to go to this HotFix request site and for the “Product and version affected”, request 947841. A few hours later, you’ll get an email with the downloadable hotfix and a password to unlock the file.
Unfortunately—NOTHING I’ve found explains what the hotfix resolves, changes, etc, but it works.
Yesterday afternoon, I noticed something odd—anytime I printed in any Office 2007 product, it’d hang the process. Meh. I had just installed some drivers for an HP 5550 DTN printer and figured that was the cause. After removing them, no dice. I couldn’t even Print to PDF since it hit the printer drivers for formatting.
Oddly enough, it wasn’t the printers—I could print from WordPad, Notepad, and FoxIt just fine. It had to be Office.
The only salvation was to remove all printers from my system. Well, that’s a bother.
I ran through the Office Diagnostics.
Word Options > Resources > Diagnose
After about 5 minutes of tests, everything came back clean.
My last hope was to repair the Office 2007 installation.
Add/Remove Programs > Office 2007 > Repair
After that finished and a reboot—things appear to be working. Why or how—I have no idea. Computers are great.
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