Fugato

Fishy hang.

My Visual Studio 2005 hung completely, out of the blue. Did not respond to any mouse clicks or keyboard events, though it did redraw.

I tried firing up another VS2005 to debug it, but that hung too and then closed.

So I tried firing up a VS2003 and attaching the native debugger to the hung VS2005. And the debugger crashed.

I sent the crash data to Microsoft, and tried again; same results several times, with the crashed VS2003 restarting automatically each time.

Finally closed the VS2003 manually, started a new one and attached, successfully. By this time the VS2005 window was gone, but the process was still there. Got a minidump of the hung VS2005 if anybody wants it.

(Incidentally, one of the process modules jumped out at me with the name custsat.dll … that might stand for “customer satisfaction,” which, taken in context, is a wee bit amusing.)

Detached and killed the VS2005 process and started a new one, but nothing came of that.

Finally resorted to a reboot, but the shutdown was interrupted by a VS2005 window appearing, with a modal dialog with this message:

TF30331: Team Explorer could not connect to the Team Foundation server source
used during your last session. The server may be offline or the network is unavailable.
Contact your Team Foundation Server administrator to confirm that the server is available
on the network. Use the Connect to Team Foundation Server command on the Tools menu to
reconnect to your previous server.

The server returned the following error: The operation has timed out

Figures that it was the Team Foundation server, because the same mess was going on on a co-worker’s machine at the same time.

But … the server catches a flu and the whole IDE hangs?

Closed the modal dialog and the studio window, rebooted, and started up VS2005 again.

It seems to be working now … but I don’t need this kind of aggravation. I have work to do, and I miss my VS.Net 2003 (!) and the trusty, robust, never-hanging Subversion we were using along with it.

I googled the error message and got nothing. So if this were Eclipse or NetBeans or IntelliJ (or, indeed, Subversion) hanging, I would go file a bug and attach the minidump to it and feel all warm and fuzzy about helping out. And I would cheerfully expect a new version fixing the problem. In less than two years’ time, even.

But it is a Microsoft product; I do not know of a public bug database, and I do not feel inclined to go telephone the uninvitingly-named “Professional Support Services” and stay on hold while all of their customer representatives are currently busy assisting other callers and will answer my call in the order in which it was received, and then try to convince one of them that I’m honestly not that big an idiot (a relatively small-framed one, in fact) and that there really is a problem. No thanks. So last-millennium.

That kind of prejudice — while indicating the image Microsoft still has, despite the best efforts of MSDN bloggers — begs to be proven wrong and unfair. I want it to be proven wrong and unfair. And sure enough: after a little spelunking, here is the place to submit feedback, without hanging around on the phone at all. I’ll go do that instead of whining like a crybaby.

All right, after signing in with my Passport login, and then signing up with name and email and age and all that (yet again — now, what was Passport for, again?), I spent about 20 minutes carefully describing what happened, providing exact product and add-in versions and the like, and then submitted. Kabloom:

And yes, that does repeat when I back up and retry the bug submission several times.

Ah well. I did give it a try. And I’m glad they have it. Just look forward to trying it out when it’s feeling better.

EOR

I sit, engrossed in flow, that exquisite state of mind where time and space cease to exist and the consciousness contains only my work, in sharp focus.

A knock on my shoulder. Guy from the department next door.

I disengross myself, switch to the media player, pause the music, take off my headphones, turn around, say hi with a question mark.

He says: “Oh, nothing, just, hi. How are you?”

I say: “Er, fine. And you?”

It turns out that he is fine as well. He absconds. I start working again, and eventually I’ll get into flow again. But I’m not in it now.

I feel like David Brent dropped by.

You know that feeling when you really have to sneeze and you’re just about to, but then you can’t, so all you do is put an enormously silly expression on your face, like the one pictured here, and then say “uhhh” and give up, woefully unsatisfied?

I’ve been doing that all day.

I hate that.