When a customer reports a drawing-specific issue, the next stage in simplifying the problem is to eliminate all drawing content that has no bearing on the problem. Unless the drawing object that causes the problem is obvious and can be immediately ascertained, I use the divide-and-conquer method to zero in on the cause. To divide …
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One type of support request that I occasionally receive from CADVault users goes something like “when I create a vault, AutoCAD crashes”. I’ve learned that problems like this are usually drawing-specific, so before going any further in simplifying the problem I ask the customer to check whether the problem occurs in an empty drawing. But there’s a trick to this. The problem is that …
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Excited news stories this morning about how your computer is vulnerable to attack from a phone plugged into your USB port made me chuckle. This “novel hack” involves making an Android phone mimic a USB keyboard in order to send keystrokes to the computer. Cool, but why wouldn’t a hacker just use a USB keyboard in the …
[Update: See Visual Studio 2010 Native Multi-Targeting] Developers, if you use VC Build Hook and/or need the same capability in Visual Studio 2010, please let Microsoft know by voting for a fix. I’ve written before (and here) about the problem. I think it is possible to hack a third party solution, but by far the …
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I’ve been chasing a drawing corruption problem on behalf of a customer. The problem manifests itself by causing a “Missing Language Pack” dialog to display when the drawing is opened (but only in Windows XP with no language packs installed — my Vista installation apparently has all the language packs installed). Installing the language packs …
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