This is a bug in the text editor (shell?) that I have seen in Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. It may not impact most developers.

I like to use word wrap because I don’t use new lines where it doesn’t make sense. So, some lines may be wider than the screen. Now to avoid scrolling which is not an ergonomic friendly act, I enable the word wrap feature for all types of languages. You can enable this by going to Tools -> Options -> Text Editor -> All Languages. The option is “Word Wrap”. I also enable the “Show visual glyphs for word wrap” option to recognize the places where the word wrapping occurs. All good.

The bug is when I try to copy the line that is wrapped using the keyboard shortcut for single line copy. You can copy the content of the current line Visual Studio by just clicking the copy button or just CTRL + C. When I do this on a wrapped line, it only copies the first line of the wrapped text. Even though content is technically a single line, the copy mechanism seems not getting it.

The line selection also works the same way. When I select the complete line by keeping the cursor at the beginning of the line and press SHIFT+DOWN, it is supposed to select the whole line. When I enable the word wrap, it doesn’t.

The argument against the argument that it should select only what is visually on the same line is that what is visually on the same line is irrelevant to developer. When I make a line copy, I almost never want something wrapped to be left out of the selection and copy. Wrapping is a function of the available screen width and a line selection based on that doesn’t make sense.

Track the bug at Microsoft Connect.

There seems to be a bug in the way Dns.GetHostEntry is implemented.

Assume that your server is in a Windows domain but the top DNS suffixis different from the domain name. There are many reasons you may want this.

When you call Dns.GetHostEntry with IP address and host name as the input, you get various outputs depending on where you made the call from.

Case 1: You are on a computer that has domain name as the dns suffix. You call Dns.GetHostEntry with the IP address and host name of a computer with different dns suffix than the domain name.

IPAddress input ->hostname.dns.suffix

Hostname input ->hostname.domain.name

Case 2: You are on a computer that has different dns suffix and domain name. You call Dns.GetHostEntry with the IP address and host name of a computer with different dns suffix than the domain name.

IPAddress input ->hostname.dns.suffix

Hostname input ->hostname.dns.suffix

Case 3: You are on a computer that has different dns suffix and domain name. You call Dns.GetHostEntry with the IP address and host name of the local host. You may also use 127.0.0.1 and localhost.

IPAddress input ->hostname.domain.name

Hostname input ->hostname.domain.name

Bottom line: That host name attribute is not reliable. nslookup always returned the hostname.dns.suffix no matter where the call came from or how I specified the input, IP Address or host name.

Here is a comment from MS Support here: “looking up a host name based on IPAddress is not reliable and in Ipv6 it is not supported”.

A discussion at work with DNS guys suggests that this call may be going to AD (Active Directory) for name resolution. In some cases it may be going to AD first. In those cases it may only be going to AD and never to DNS.

Here is the code to test it:

using System;
using System.Net;

namespace DnsQuery
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            try
            {
                if (1 != args.Length)
                {
                    Console.WriteLine("Usage:");
                    Console.WriteLine("DnsQuery <IP Address>");
                    Console.WriteLine("        OR");
                    Console.WriteLine("DnsQuery <Host Name>");
                    return;
                }
                Console.WriteLine(Dns.GetHostEntry(args[0]).HostName);
            }
            catch (Exception Ex)
            {
                Console.WriteLine(Ex.Message);
            }
        }
    }
}

I wanted to use Orb for streaming video to Xbox 360.
- Orb did not even show videos that are played by default windows media player streaming.
- Pictures and Videos categorized in subfolders in a drive never appeared on the xbox 360 console.
- WMVHD videos that I can double click and play on PC could not be played through orb on the same PC.
- My system became unresponsive all of a sudden and CPU fan started running full blast.

Here are some features that would be attractive to me.

Simple domain setup. I guess home group will that. That is fine with me.

Ability to host my blog. I think I can install Apache and MySQL. Need to run some experiments.

Simple DNS. Again, open source software may be for the rescue.

Simple DHCP.

Simple mail server.

If you develop exclusively for Windows environment, it is nice to keep standard WIndows look and feel. Notpad++ doesn’t feel like a Windows application. A lot of things you are used to as a Windows user doesn’t work in Notepadd++. At work I purchased UltraEdit for that reason. Newest UltraEdit is a departure from the good old UltrEdit feel though. Visual Studio Express editions are free and may be becoming a threat to all these editors.

On the preferences->devices tab, I have checked the prevent iPhones and iPods from syncing automatically. I do not want the sync kicking in every time I connect my iPhone to the computer. It stops the playback of whatever I am listening to and won’t go back and continue playing whatever I was playing before the sync kicked in. It is an annoyance. At least it should provide an option not to auto sync when I am playing something or running an application.

So, here is the problem. Whenever I connect my iPhone to the computer, iTunes does a short sync of sort even though I have disabled the auto sync. I don’t know what it is doing but it does reset whatever I was playing. All the podcasts I listened since the last sync are reset back to the state of the last sync.

I do have a workaround though. I close the iTunes before I connect the iPhone to the computer. Once I connect and the iPhone beeps/vibrates, I can open the iTunes. Now it won’t do that short sync. The problem is I keep forgetting to close the iTunes before I connect my iPhone to the computer. Most of the times I just scrub through the podcasts I already listened to get around this. When the number of podcasts I already listened are large, I have to listen a bit to figure out if I already listened them.

Update: This workaround doesn’t work! I just had one instance where it did sync and mess up my podcasts.

I have no guesses on what is the real purpose of this sync. If this problem does not appear on iPod Touch, my guess would be something pushed by AT&T through iTunes.

I also don’t know if the same issue occurs on the Mac version of iTunes.

I have noticed that the links inside the emails from TFS were not accessible. I usually don’t click on those links but someone tried. The problem was that it had https instead of http. I was trying to figure out how to resolve this problem. Then I came across this blog post by Buck Hodges. Now that looked like a better option. After all I have TFS web access installed.

After configuring web access to be the links from emails I got an email from MOM group saying the SharePoint  services not being able to connect to the database. The error message was “Cannot connect to the configuration database. For tips on troubleshooting this error, search for article 823287 in the Microsoft Knowledge Base at http://support.microsoft.com.” It turns out that the patch from KB957196 – Checkin event e-mail alert notification doesn’t work(download) caused the trouble. It had reset the identity of the application pool TFSWSS to Network Service.  In the original installation it was set to the TFS Service account.

The solution was to set the account back to the TFS Service account. To do this, open the IIS configuration tools, expand the application pools, select TFSWSS pool and right click. Select properties and there is the tab for identity. Change from predefined to configurable and set the user name and password.

Once you change that, the reporting services may fail with the message “The Report Server Web Service is unable to access secure information in the report server. Please verify that the WebServiceAccount is specified correctly in the report server config file. (rsAccessDeniedToSecureData)”. To fix this, open the reporting services configuration from SQL Server start menu groups and click on the web service identity. This may already be flagged red. make sure the ASP.NET service account is the TFS Service account. Also specify both application pools as TFSWSS. If the settings are already set to these, just change one of the entries to something else and set it back. This will enable the “Apply” button.

Yesterday I got rid of the final Windows Vista installation I had. That is a monster machine with so many applications installed and configured I did not want to start on it unless I had enough time to deactivate/de-authorize applications, take backup of user settings etc.

Here are some images of my experience during the Windows 7 64 bit installation.

Those were due to BIOS settings that were not compatible and RAID1 being getting ready or something like that. Complete setup, user configuration restore and such completed in about 2 hours.

This time around for virus scan I chose Microsoft Security Essentials. One thing that link didn’t say at the time was that it is only for 32 bit. I downloaded and ran the setup and it failed saying it is 32 bit only. The error message had a link to get the 64 bit.

I do have Office 2007 professional but I decided to install Office 2010 beta.

I just completed the installation of Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate beta on the new Windows 7 64 bit installation. I setup the backup to a SAMBA network drive. It failed a few times. I reduced the backup size (removed the HD video files from camcorder, I use Microsoft SyncToy for that.) and it is running right now. Windows backup to network location is still lagging.

Look at this image. Shouldn’t it say “login” or something like that? I have been seeing this for a while now.

Update March 6, 2010: This is how you can reproduce this. At least on the Chrome browser. Login to Twitter and make sure to check that remember me button. Usually the session expires in a day or two. Set the Chrome start up to open the previous tabs. Keep the Twitter tab open when you close the browser. Next day when you open the browser the Twitter will be logged off showing the above screen. When you click on the Sign In, you will see the button saying “Create List” instead of “Sign In”. If you try to reproduce this by just logging out, you won’t see this bug. Your session must time out.