Although I've mostly retired, I'm still doing a few hours of maintenance and debugging each week for old products. In my previous post about easing into retirement, I mentioned many examples of random idiotic wildly counterproductive things keep going wrong and suck all enjoyment of software development. Idiotic things are still happening, and this post is a growing log of recent IT idiocy that I can shows to friends and colleagues as proof of how "everything f***ing doesn't work".
February 2025 — Visual Studio 2022 Licensing SOLVED
Azure Storage Explorer was telling me that some accounts needed reauthentication, which I did and it seemed to work.
About an hour later I launch Visual Studio 2022 and it tells me that my trial period has expired. I spend an hour entering my usual credentials
over and over and over, but the problem remains unchanged. I notice that the account dialog says: This product is licensed to: wrong address.
For another hour I search for how to change the license address, or cancel it, or do anything useful. The next day, with a fresh mind I bumble into a fix by
changing the Account Options > combo Windows authentication broker to Embedded web browser, relaunching VS, entering my credentials again, which causes
everything to come good and the Accounts screen is sensible and shows no alerts. I then revert the combo and relaunch VS, which causes more authentication
prompts, but they are also finally satisfied and all problems are solved with the original settings restored. By looking at some files in
%TEMP%\servicehub\logs I see Could not find a WAM account message which lead to
This Community Issue
which is solved using exactly the same workaround that I used by dumb luck. Cost: about 5 man-hours.
February 2025 — Dynamic C# Source Compile PENDING
in July 2014 I posted an article titled Dynamic C# code compilation
where I use the CSharpCodeProvider class to compile C# source code at runtime, then invoke a method inside the generated Assembly.
Unfortunately that technique only works in the full .NET Framework and is deprecated in .NET Core. I went looking for modern equivalent code so I
could udpate the post. After two hours of searching I found several samples that all did not work for various reasons, even the MSDN sample code produced
a PlatformNotSupportedException, and the docs confusingly confirmed that was expected for .NET Core 2+. I eventually found some (non working) sample code
that used the CSharpCompilation and related classes, which I tweaked and almost worked. It produces compile errors because the basic references are not found,
despite the fact that I pass a list of them to the compilation. I have no idea how to proceed and am totally blocked on this problem. Cost: about 4 man-hours so far.
January 2025 — Sound Problems SOLVED
Playback through the line-out stops working and only the speakers in the screen work. All sound recording stops because Audacity says
there are no input devices. After an hour of inspecting Windows settings and cables I discover that the power cable and another have been pulled
out of the small mixer out of sight behind my screen. I think a cat got stuck behind my desk and got tangled in the cables trying to get out.
I put all the cables back and reboot. Playback now works, but not recording.
I stuff around with more settings in Windows and Audacity and after more than an hour of random stuffing around the recording device is visible
and I can select it and recording works again. Cost: about two hours.
