Scenario: You have a 32-bit managed process running on a 64-bit machine. The process crashes sometimes. The customer created a crash dump in the Task Manager and sent it to you. You try to open it in the VS Debugger, but realize that the call stack looks really strange and does not contain any useful information. What’s the problem?
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Debugging of Windows Services in general is not an easy task. Due to their nature Windows Services require some tricks from a developer. One of the most hardest problem with Windows Services is the crashes in the production environment due to unhandled exceptions in the program, e.g. access violation, division by zero, etc. In such situations crash dumps are invaluable. Of course, you should always keep in mind to save the binaries and debug symbols for each build and do correct versioning. Some developers include exception handlers right into Windows Services, so the program itself can write a crash dump. Another option is to write an external watch-dog application (usually, another small Windows Service, which controls the execution of main Service and writes a mini dump in case of problems).
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In VS2005 running Unit Tests with Code Coverage enabled and having the Assembly signed all unit tests fail. You may see then an error message “Strong name validation failed“. The reason is simple.
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Recently, I’ve faced with a problem when suddenly I started getting error messages loading a project from the Team Foundation Server. The solution consists of 5 projects, and during loading of the solution one of the project was not loaded and I received the error message “The project file ‘ ‘ has been moved, renamed or is not on your computer“. It took me a while to solve the problem. It seems to be a bug in the Visual Studio / Team Foundation Server. The problem is that the binding information was not correctly saved in the .suo file.
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There is no difference in project files (.vcproj) except the version number, you can easily open projects created with VS2005 in VS.NET 2003 by modyfing the version number of the project using the text editor.

IMPORTANT
Unfortunately, solution files (.sln) in VS2005 and VS.NET 2003 have different formats and there is no utilities available to convert solution files from VS2005 to VS.NET 2003 format. So you must create a new solution in VS.NET 2003 and then add converted projects.

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Problem description

When two objects of the MainMenu class having menu items with the MergeType=MergeItems and with the identical MergeOrder are merged using the MergeMenu method, the Popup event handler of the target menu item is getting lost.

The following example illustrates the problem.
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This article demonstrates the syntax higtlighting for different languages.

Please test it with your browser.

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