jokiz : bug

"Subscript out of range" error when enumerating pagebreaks in Excel

jokiz — Tue, 08 May 2007 03:45:00 GMT

I had an issue yesterday with my previous Excel VBA project where the user is experiencing the very common:

Run-time error '9':
Subscript out of range

Surprisingly, i found out that the said exception was being raised on a foreach construct for the pagebreak collection specifically when it hit the following line:

For Each verticalPageBreak In aWorksheet.VPageBreaks
columnIndex = verticalPageBreak.Location.Column
....
Next

I was scratching my head, why the hell would a foreach construct raise a subscript out of range exception! As usual, i did a research on usenet, because for scenarios like this, i'm sure there's another guy who had previously bumped into the said issue, i found one here.

Turns out that the pagebreaks collection in Excel is buggy. This was illustrated by a known bug in excel found in this Knowledge Base. I tried doing the hacks proposed by the guys in the usenet post to no avail (and besides, i do not understand those SendKeys and the Excel4ForMacro workarounds).

My requirement was just to redefine valid vertical pagebreaks because i will be printing a long landscaped worksheet. What's weird is I also found out that the said exception is existing if i have a smaller screen resolution (1024x768 and below), however it is not encountered on computeres having a bigger resolution, this means cause #2 from the KB is the root of the problem.

However, selecting the rightmost used cell as suggested by the KB did not solve the problem. Luckily i found my own hack by having the ActiveWindow ScrollColumn set to be the last used column before doing the vertical page break iteration. Issue closed.

Cannot empty clipboard from excel

jokiz — Mon, 08 Jan 2007 05:28:45 GMT

I experience the cannot empty clipboard error message today again which i encountered last year:

I did a search and found this.

designtime visual inheritance bug for new .NET 2.0 controls

jokiz — Wed, 23 Aug 2006 08:27:00 GMT

i just found out a bug on visual inheritance concerning the new controls in .NET 2.0. Basically it says that if you have an inherited control (non-private), designer won't allow you to "design it" in the child form (they're locked). more info here.

systray icon tooltips behind taskbar

jokiz — Wed, 10 May 2006 08:01:00 GMT

once in a while, i notice that the tooltips of my icons are behind the taskbar which is rather annoying. i finally did a google today and found this tip:

How To: Fix Tooltips hide behind taskbar

vs 2003 bug with embedded resources

jokiz — Tue, 28 Mar 2006 23:22:00 GMT

an officemate of mine got this problem wherein he had specified already the mapping xml files for nhibernate but when he tries to debug it, it was not able to load the said mapping files. turns out he found a bug in vs 2003 that i should have found out months ago.

visual studio 2003 does not detect changes to files configured as embedded resource so if these are the only files that you edited and you do a build (build does a rebuild if vs has detected a change by the way),
your assembly will not be updated since vs did not detect any change.

i had this problem in my last project when i just edited the strings in a resx file and did not see the changes reflected when i do an f5-run. it's a mess because i ended up restarting the IDE since i could not figure out the problem then.

problem is i could not find a single kb about this and all i can find in usenet is it is a known bug. good thing the nhibernate docs has this bug cited in their documentation.

VS AuthoHide window bug

jokiz — Thu, 04 Aug 2005 10:47:00 GMT

One innovation I love most with with Visual Studio is their AutoHide windows. I always configure every window (server explorer, debug windows, etc.) to be AutoHide to maximize my code view (eventhough I have a 1280 x 1024 resolution at font size 8).

The only problem with the said feature is its bug. There is a known AuthoHide window bug for Visual Studio .NET wherein they sometimes mess up especially for add-ins. When they mess up, window becomes not functional.

Jetbrains Refactor has an issue with their Find Results window here.

The thing I hate most is its conflict with VSS Pending Checkins. I am the type of guy who only wants the minimum window open so I rarely use Enterprise Manger or Query Analyzer. I use all the tools in VS and when Pending Checkins window messes up, I couldn’t do anything but restart devenv.exe. As they say, it’s a real PITA.

Intellisense vs Shadowed functions

jokiz — Tue, 26 Jul 2005 07:42:00 GMT

How come Visual Studio intellisense could not resolve shadowed/newed functions, they are still showing the “shadowed” functions.

Pending Checkins Window

jokiz — Tue, 21 Jun 2005 06:32:00 GMT

I always use the "Pending Checkins" window once in a while so I've assigned a shortcut for it. One feature that I would want with VSS and VS integration is the ability to browse the code sheet of an item from the said window.

Anyways, checkout the bug that I encountered with the said window...

Talk about a breaking change

jokiz — Tue, 03 May 2005 06:27:00 GMT

Last time, I reported a bug on the ToolBar control of Windows Forms which I have discovered upon a query of an officemate. I just saw that there is an update on my reported bug as Won’t Fix due to a breaking change, :p.

Nested SWITCH statements in VS

jokiz — Fri, 11 Mar 2005 07:22:00 GMT

Have you tried doing a nested switch statements in Visual Studio. I have tried this and VS is somewhat altering the proper indents. I couldn’t find any flaw on using nested switch statements but the behavior is intriguing. Below are some screenshots:

ToolBar.DropDownArrows property is flawed

jokiz — Thu, 17 Feb 2005 15:22:00 GMT

An officemate of mine could not disable the DropDownArrows for the DropDownButton style ToolBarButton. After trying it out and using Reflector, I found out that the default value for the DropDownArrows property of the .NET ToolBar is not properly configured. The DefaultValue of the said property is FALSE while the initialized value is set to TRUE. It is a rule in .NET to always synchronize the two values.

Steps to Reproduce:

Drag a ToolBar control to a form. (You'll notice that the DropDownArrows property is already set to TRUE, bold signifying a a non-default value)
Add some buttons to its button collection.
Configure one of the toolbarbutton to be DropDownButton Style
Set the ToolBar's DropDownArrows property to FALSE
At designtime, you will not see the DropDownArrows. Hit F5 (run) to see the inconsistency.

Undo feature bug of VS2003

jokiz — Wed, 02 Feb 2005 22:11:00 GMT

Create a form with anchored controls. (Not just the default Top | Left)
Resize the form
Hit Undo (Ctrl-Z), voila!

The Undo feature at design time is handled by the Windows Forms Designer and the said functionality is one of the complex implementations in .NET that I am still unfamiliar with up to this time (I still don’t have time to analyze it fully). If ever you are using Anchoring on a form, you can’t just undo a Form Resize operation because the Anchored controls will not go back to its previous state. Anchoring and Docking are two of the powerful features of Visual Studio but if you are not aware of this behavior for Anchoring, your design-time experience will be f%&($!^d up.

If ever this scenario happens, you can just close the Form and not save your changes but what if you have already applied a number of changes before you undo a form resize with anchored controls, then it’s annoying. Of course you can just delete the generated Layout properties of the Anchored controls but it’s not practical if you have a number of them and its not even a good practice to edit the InitializeComponent method.

There is a bug post of this at the Product Feedback Center and MS says that this has been fixed in version 2.0. How come MS didn’t include this in their last Service Pack 1 release?