I don’t often specifically mention my company when I blog, but we’re looking for a developer. Short description: “VB 2005, SQL 2005, RFID”. Slightly longer description here. For even more info, please contact me directly — I get copied on messages sent to the e-mail alias on the job posting. If you or someone you know is interested, please let me know.
Category: Uncategorized Page 13 of 31
I downloaded the latest beta of Windows Live Writer* a couple days ago and have finally gotten around to making a post with it. I didn’t have any real issues with the previous version, although there were a couple things I would have liked changed. Applying tags (categories) to a post is not any easier now than it was with the previous version, but it is harder to forget now. There is a setting that causes WLW to remind me to add categories before posting. A nice friendly dialog pops up and says something along the lines of, “You haven’t categorized this post yet. Do you want to post it anyway?”
All in all, WLW makes it much more enjoyable to post. Since I started using it I’ve posted more. I still may go a while between posts, but when I post one, it is so easy that I usually end up posting a couple more within a short amount of time. For example, this is my third post in about 20 minutes.
Anyway, I recommend you download and try it. It works with lots of popular blogging engines.
* = When I first type “Windows Live Writer”, I misspelled it and typed “Windows Lice Writer” For some reason I thought that was funny enough to mention here. Maybe it’s my level of sleepiness?
I spoke briefly about my haircut schedule here. I think I was already at week 7 or 8 then, so that would put me somewhere around week 12 or so now.
I tried to get it cut today, but the wait was longer than my schedule would allow. Oh well, maybe next week.
Lately I’ve been tired. Extremely tired. There are many factors contributing to my tiredness, such as work, um, yeah, I guess that’s the big one. As I was typing this sentence I actually sat here for 30 seconds trying to think of what else could be making me tired aside from how much I’ve been working. I guess there are other things, like poor sleep quality when I do sleep, my eating habits, my lack of exercise, etc., but work is the big one wearing me out right now.
I was talking to the guys at the office about it and to illustrate my point I drew a graph on the whiteboard. I’ve decided to replicate that here as well. I don’t know why, really — probably because I haven’t posted in a while and I figured that this was as good a topic as anything else I could come up with.
Anyway, as you can see from my very (non)scientific graph to the right (click for larger version), somewhere around the end of May or beginning of June I became tired enough to experience mild hallucinations. OK, not really, but I have been noticing problems reading recently — I think I’ve read a certain word in a sentence/paragraph, and it just really doesn’t make any sense. It’s not until I’ve re-read it a few times that I realize that that word isn’t what was written at all.
I’ve also experienced some short-term memory issues recently, as in the last couple years. For example, I’ll be working, and I’ll Alt-Tab to another open program to do something, and by the time the application has come into focus, I’ve forgotten what I was going to do with it. I swear that this happens at least a dozen times per day, and it’s very frustrating. I’m actually surprised that it hasn’t happened yet while I’ve been writing this post.
Anyway, I just wanted to show off my awesome graphing skills and put up a post since it had been a while. That’s all.
I’ve been working on this same project at work for several months now, and today I started having some issues. I went to “save all” and got a message that there was insufficient storage. Since I have nearly 20GB free on my disk I knew that wasn’t exactly right. I looked in Task Manager and, lo and behold, devenv.exe was using over 1GB or my RAM. I have 2GB RAM on this machine so I didn’t notice any issues with other programs while this was happening. It was just VS.
I’m hoping someone will have some thoughts on what I might try to fix this problem. It’s very frustrating because I have to close VS regularly and re-launch it to release this memory.
So anyway, first, a little background.
My System Setup
I have a Dell XPS laptop, 2.?? GHz Intel, 2GB RAM, 100GB HDD. I have Windows XP Pro, SP2. I am running VS 2005 with SP1 that came out a few months ago. I recently (within the last week or so), removed all of the .NET 3.0 stuff I had (framework, VS extensions, etc.), as well as ASP.NET AJAX, and reinstalled them to make sure I had the latest bits of everything.
My System Snapshot
After starting the morning with a fresh semi-weekly reboot, I started working as normal. Currently running on my system, besides VS 2005:
- Outlook 2003
- SQL Server 2000, 2005 Express, and SQL Server Mgmt Studio
- iTunes
- Windows Live Messenger
- Cropper
- My RSS reader
- Various other tiny apps and things that just run with Windows XP
The Solution
The entire solution takes roughly 150MB on disk, including resources such as images and documents, and has 9 projects (all VB.NET):
- A client EXE
- A Windows service
- Two other EXEs
- Five shared libraries (DLLs)
I have a custom build configuration that is exactly the same as the standard “Debug” build configuration, except that it does not build the service (since it is usually running). When I want to build the service, I stop the service, switch to Debug, build, switch back to custom build configuration.
This project is not under source control through VS, so I am doing manual backups on a regular basis. I know this is wrong on so many levels, but when I started, there was no source control server. I have since set one up, but haven’t added the project yet. In the meantime, I am backing up to a time-stamped folder on the network.
The Problem
So far, except for the .NET 3.0 and AJAX un/re-install, this is no different than my environment has been for the last several months. Yet today, I was having troubles. After I noticed the trouble for a while, I decided to close down VS and start it up again, this time keeping track of what I did and the effects on memory usage. I did some simple documenting of my step, and took some screenshots of Task Manager. I recorded memory usage after each step, although I failed to take screen shots at each step, so I’ve just included a few of those for kicks. So, here goes:
| Step Taken | Memory Usage of devenv.exe |
|---|---|
|
VS loaded, no open solutions or files |
44MB |
Solution loaded, no open files |
208MB |
| Solution open and 3 source files open | 212MB |
| Build solution | 231MB |
Make a small change, build again |
270MB |
| Change build configuration to debug (so I can build my service so that it refers to the correct version of my shared libraries) | 299MB |
| Build solution | 326MB |
Change back to custom build configuration |
356MB |
| Make another small change and build again | 396MB |
| Do something that causes several errors. I commented out a base class, causing all inherited classes to have errors. This ended up with ~150 various errors. This was just so I could see what would happen if there were errors. I didn’t really perform this step in “real life”. | 420MB |
Try building again with these errors present |
519MB |
Immediately try building again, with no changes of any kind |
590MB |
| Fix one error. I uncommented the Class / End Class lines that I had commented a moment before, but left the class members commented. | 647MB |
| Try building again | 672MB |
| Fix half the remaining errors, by uncommenting half the commented members | 702MB |
| Try building again | 723MB |
| Fix remaining errors | 756MB |
Build again |
757MB |
| Change build configuration back to Debug so I could build my service | 786MB |
| Build again | 826MB |
| Change back to custom build coninguration | 850MB |
| Build again | 891MB |
Add “Dim a As String” to a class file and save |
924MB |
| Build again | 939MB |
| Remove “Dim a As String” from the previously mentioned class file | 968MB |
Build again |
976MB |
Close open files and solution, leaving VS still open |
895MB |
So, what’s the deal? Is it related to the .NET 3.0 / AJAX stuff I mentioned above? I know some of the steps I’ve mentioned are contrived, but they’re not at all unrealistic. The process of adding a variable declaration, building, removing it, building again shouldn’t really take up 85MB of RAM that never gets released, right?
I did a quick Google search for Visual Studio 2005 memory leaks, but didn’t find anything helpful in the first page or so, so I stopped looking hoping that someone might have a suggestion. If anyone has any ideas, please comment on this post or e-mail me directly. If you don’t have my e-mail address, you can use the contact form on this site. This isn’t stopping me from working, but it’s stopping me from working effectively.
As you may or may not know, I use Telligent’s Community Server as a blog engine here, as well as for photos and forums elsewhere. Well, they are having a Theme Extravaganza — a contest for making custom themes. Prizes include MacBooks, XBox 360s and Amazon gift cards.
Dan Bartels, a Milwaukee area local, works for Telligent, and he contacted me the other day with this offer:
While I cannot enter the “public contest” I’d be willing to give some help to some folks to get them started, point them in the right direction, ect… So please extend this offer to anyone you see fit.
Further, we are having in “internal” contest; here is where I could use some help… I could use some PSD’s and or artwork from a community member (I will give them full credit and linkage for the design)…
If you’re interested, please contact Dan, either via his website or by e-mailing him at dbartels AT telligent DOT com.
Good luck!
So it looks like Google is now using a new logo on their “ig” start page, rebranding it as “iGoogle”. I saw the logo when I got online tonight, and then a quick search led me to this (more).
Personally, I think this is a pretty lame name. I thought Apple was the only one still prepending words with the letter “i” to create a brand. That’s so 1999. [;)]
Regardless of the name, it’s still my home page.
http://www.d-e-f-i-n-i-t-e-l-y.com/ (via Seth)
BTW, it was very painful for me to type “definately” in the title. I hope you can appreciate the humor. [;)]
Today, a co-worker mentioned that he was going to get a haircut tonight after work. I mentioned that I normally go about 2 months between cuts. Considering that I have short hair, he thought that was a long time so I explained my thought process.
Week 4 (since my last haircut): I start thinking, “It’s about time to get a haircut.”
Week 5: “Hmmm, it’s about time to get a haircut.”
Week 6-7: “I really need a haircut.”
Week 8: I try to make an appointment, but can’t get one thats convenient.
Week 9: I finally go out of my way and just get it taken care of.
Week 10: “My hair is too short.”
If you subscribe to my feed in RSS, you may be interested to know that the address has change to http://feeds.feedburner.com/tapmymind. From what I can tell, if your RSS reader supports redirects (which I imagine most do these days), you shouldn’t have to change anything. If not, however, you will need to switch to the new address.
I decided to try FeedBurner because they offer various statistics that might not otherwise be available. Plus, all the cool kids are doing it. [:)]