One of my duties at my job is to enhance and maintain a mature VB.Net windows application used internally by my company. We run 8 computers at the small company that each runs the app with no problems.
Recently we replaced one of the computers with a pretty standard notebook running Win 7 Professional with SP1 and for some reason, it won't display message boxes displayed using the normal MessageBox.Show("Message") method.
The vendor who sold us the computer says it must be the program, and I kind of sympathize with that view, but the fact is we have 8 other computers that all display their message boxes just fine.
Thought I'd post the issue here to see if anyone else has run into this and, if so, did they find a resolution?
I'm going to paint outside the lines a little bit and answer my own question with sort of a non-answer.
We battled that computer for about a week and a half and finally gave up and reinstalled the OS. Problem solved. Not really an answer because we still don't know what was going on or why reinstalling the OS fixed it.
Reinstalling was really an act of frustration/desperation as much as anything else. In the end we were just thankful the problem went away and we could move on. Figured I'd get this off of the unanswered questions list since I'm not really waiting for or expecting an answer at this point.
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Its probably best to mention first this issue is on a school system.
The issues is that when i start my program, the first form is fine but the second form scales very strangely so everything is small and blurry.
When I open my project I get a message saying my main display is set to 200% so I click the link to restart with 100% but the problem persists,
this issue suddenly appeared without me changing anything which leads me to believe it's an issue with the school system but I'm unsure and would be welcome to any suggestions.
Ok bear with me because i am frustrated beyond belief right now.
go back about 30 minutes ago, i create a VB windows forms application. cool, nothing out of the ordinary only i make a big mistake and decide to start again. so i close the solution, delete the project folder and go to start again, only now i'm presented with
"requested operation cant be performed on file with user-mapped section open"
ok i think, there's obviously something still reading it or whatever, so i close VS completely and restart.. no avail. log off and try again. nothing. restart the computer. still nothing. what is causing this issue? i can create a C# Windows Forms Application without a frigging problem. everything BUT a VB WFA. what do i do? i'm in no real position to re-install VS right now or i'd have started 20 minutes ago. i really need a helping hand here please
I have this annoying bug in MS Expression Web 4 SP2, weird GUI quirks: you can see in the picture: like parts of the display isn't being painted. I had this before, and solved it by uninstalling something, but the problem is that I don't remember what it was... (I installed Exp.Web in fresh Win7 PC, and step by step installing everything, until this problem came up.)
Anybody came across this issue maybe ?
The problem is a program called FileBox eXtender. It's excellent program I use to pin windows to have them always on top (never be hidden by other windows), because it does its job and it's free. Unfortunately, MS-Expression (Web, Blend, etc...) doesn't get along with it, so I excluded it (somewhere in FileBox-eXtender's options) and now it's o.k.
I've inherited a lot of custom made software for an office, and, while managing it, I've found it performs differently from machine to machine.
I mean, some controls get painted in weird ways in some machines but well in another, or just work differently, like in some machines clicking something selects it, and in the next machine clicking the same thing makes it editable.
I suspect, of course, of the myriad of DLL the software loads.
Why does it happen? Is there any way of avoiding it?
Edit:
All the machines are Windows XP SP3, Internet Explorer 8
"get paint in weird ways" to me means things like a control being painted 300 or 400 pixels bigger in a machine than in the others (overlapping part of the GUI).
I would suspect that some COM components are the issue (COMCTL32 would be my first guess), and that it isn't really a VB.NET problem. Versioning in the .NET world has been made so that the typical DLL hell issues shouldn't happen as they did before, but there are always some relics around...
Without more info I doubt that there will be a final answer to your question. You may want to start your troubleshooting by comparing Windows, Service Packs and IE versions.
Step 1. Ensure all machines have the exact same updates applied. This goes beyond the service pack. Run Windows Update on each machine and apply everything you can. I suspect you have radically different patch levels across the board.
Step 2. Ensure all machines have the native screen resolution set. This is more important for flat panels than the ancient CRT monitors.
Step 3. Look at the video drivers. Make sure you have the latest ones for those machines.
Step 4. Make sure the exact same version of your app really is deployed across all of the machines. If there are external dependencies, verify those are the same as well.
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I know this isn't strictly a programming question but y'all must have experienced this.
So...you have four or five RDP sessions open over the corp VPN, you're bashing away inside your favourite IDE, your VPN to the data centre bounces briefly then recovers, all your RDP sessions start re-establishing their connections and whilst doing so sequentially keep grabbing focus, one after the other. Pretty bloody annoying and downright rude.
Any idea how to prevent this behaviour and just make the RDP client flash it's taskbar button instead of totally grabbing focus away from whatever you were doing?
#Jason - thanks for the reply, I'm running 64 bit Vista and 64 Bit Windows 2008. Any ideas how well it plays?
#Jason - good idea. Done.
#Ryan - thanks also for the answer. I tried Terminals a few times before, but quite often I need to see two or three sessions side by side which the tabbing doesn't really facilitate too well, would've been nice to have a 'pop out in own window' button. I did once grab the source code to fix stuff like that, but never got the time. I also found it behaved oddly whenever there was a brief network disconnect (e.g. xDSL flapping) and it would reconnect to the wrong session (usually a new one) and leave the session I had opened in a disconnected state on the server. Otherwise Terminals would've been really cool, we have 200+ windows servers, and organising all those .rdp files can be a pain.
I use Tweak UI to configure explorer so that apps don't steal focus; you can also configure how many times they flash in the taskbar as well.
EDIT: Once you are within Tweak UI, these options are found under General > Focus.
EDIT: #Kev, apparently there is a 64-bit version (not MS approved, apparently, I would scan it for viruses of course) that works successfully with the 64-bit version of XP. From what I understand, you download that and then run it in XP compatibility mode as administrator and it will do the trick. Tweak UI is basically a nice wrapper around a collection of registry hacks, so I imagine you could find the hacks themselves if you didn't care for running Tweak UI in this manner. Hope that works for you!
As an alternative, you could try using something like Terminals. It allows you to have multiple remote desktop windows open at once all as tabs in the same window. Quite cool. Also, it is open source so you can change its behavior if needed (although I don't believe it steals focus like a normal RDP session does).
Since I don't think there's an approved version of TweakUI other than for XP. Apparently making this change in the registry has a similar impact for Vista:
[HKEY_CURRENT_USER\ControlPanel\Desktop]
ForegroundLockTimeout = 0
However I found (Vista x64) that while focus on the original was maintained the offending window would still take the foreground - quite distracting.