Strange UI error with text turning to blocks on WPF application - wpf

I have been developing a WPF application and this morning a test user reported a strange bug in the UI.
All of a sudden in only this application it has replaced all of the text with blocks (see image below)
I have tried restoring the application, uninstalling it off the machine and then reinstalling it - but no luck.
Anyone have an idea what could be causing the problem? The program works fine on everyone else's machines (he is using Windows XP SP3)

This probably suggests a font that the app is using is missing, or corrupted, on that system.

Related

Combo Box / Context Menu strange behaviour (invisible)

I have written an application in WPF/VB.net and have been testing it on a few different computers.
I have never experienced this issue on my development machine but one of my test machines has a strange issue where combo box lists and context menus are invisible.
The objects are there and you can select items from them but they are not being drawn.
I am scratching my head with this and have been searching for evidence of similar issues online but not really found anything.
I would like to completely rule out that this is a programming issue before going down the route of pointing the blame at any particular hardware my company is using.
I am using one click deployment and have transparency enabled on my windows.
This is an intermittent problem and restarting the PC will fix the issue. Restarting the application does not make the issue go away.
Thanks
Check that the machine you have problems with has the correct .net framework loaded. If you are using any other products such as Silverlight then check versions.
This issue was fixed by forcing software rendering on windows XP within the App.
This was done by adding the following line to application start up.
RenderOptions.ProcessRenderMode = System.Windows.Interop.RenderMode.SoftwareOnly

Silverlight 4 OOB White Screen of Death. Failed to load pre-requisites for the application

I'm developing a SL4 OOB application that has suddenly started giving me the white screen of death.
If I try to run it 'in-browser' and check the console I can see the error 2105 : 'Failed to load pre-requisites for the application' but there's very little info about it anywhere.
None of my breakpoints get hit. Even starting the app with F11 (step into) doesn't get me anywhere.
I can run other Silverlight projects just fine so it's not the runtime. I've even copied the source into another project to see if that might help but to no avail.
Does anyone have any ideas how I might get started fixing this?
I have seen this myself and it was a pain..
What I had to do was a system restore, de-installed all traces of Silverlight and Blend and then reinstalled them all. However I had also just installed Silverlight 5 RC which didn't play nicely with Telerik and might have been the problem.
There is also some information about this error here:
http://connect.microsoft.com/VisualStudio/feedback/details/530074/unhandled-error-in-silverlight-application-2105-when-building-as-an-x86-configuration.
Is this your problem?
Damn it, I hate answering my own questions but the problem was quite obscure.
Somehow, I managed to get a regular .Net reference in my Silverlight project through a Nuget package. That was it.
DOH!

Why does Inspect.exe not display the AutomationId and other UIAutomation properties when running in debug?

I've been using Inspect.exe from the Windows SDK to examine the properties of a WinForms application but noticed that I didn't see any of the properties (for example, the AutomationId) whilst running the application from Visual Studio (F5 to run.) However, if I ran the .exe from the bin\debug folder I could see the properties fine.
The source I was using was example code downloaded from UI Automation Custom Provider Samples - Part 3.
I'm wondering why this happened since I'm sure another machine that I had tried this on worked fine and I wasted time poking around in debug mode wondering why my UI Automation properties weren't visible. Obviously there's a workaround but I'd like to understand why this was happening and have a record of the problem for other people to find!
I've struck upon the answer - because I had launched Visual Studio as Administrator but the Inspect.exe tool as standard user then the properties being reported back were a sub-set of what I should have seen. As soon as I launched Inspect.exe as Administrator it worked!

WPF Application Hang

I'm using Windows 7 Professional (x64) and having installed .NET 4.0 RTM on my machine.
Since 2 days I'm noticing that every WPF application that I'm trying to run hangs and becomes non responsive (a not responding text is appended to it's title bar) and it's painted white.
There is no info regarding any exception, no error message. Nothing. Even the Event Log shows that there was "application hang" event (code 1002) and nothing more.
This problem is for everything that is written in WPF, even for products like NHibernate Profiler and other stuff that I was using on a regular basis without any issues.
Tried to reinstall .NET 4.0 and nothing changed. Any ideas why this might be happening?
I had the same problem. It was a corrupt font cache!!
See http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/7cc032c1-5f4d-4518-adc6-f53afd051e6b for a solution.
If I had to guess I would say video drivers. It might help to try attaching Visual Studio's debugger to the hung process (Debug -> Attach to Process) making sure that Managed Code is the selected debugger type. Then you can break into the debugger and maybe see a common stack trace.

Running a WPF application on Windows XP

I recently built a new application using WPF, so that I can learn the new technology. Now that I am trying to deploy the application, it appears as if it is running fine on a Vista system, but on a Windows XP SP2 machine with the .Net fx 3.5SP1, it's not able to load the PresentationFramework.dll file.
I did some further investigation into this and discovered that there is a slight build difference between the PresentationFramework.dll files on my xp test machines vs. what is on my Vista development machine.
What I'm curious about is if anyone else has run into this issue as well, and what they did to remedy the situation so that they could develop on Windows Vista, but deploy the developed application to both Vista and XP clients.
Thanks.
I need to add to this a bit... on the vista machine and on the client machine, I've got .Net Fx 3.5 SP1. I had done a bit of digging, and found out that the PresentationFramework.dll file is the same, except the last set of versioning numbers.
Has anyone found a decent work around for this issue?
Sorry that I left this stagnant, but I figured out the issue I was running into. Turned out that there was corruption in the Windows XP box I was using as a test bed.
I was working between stackoverflow and another forum for the package I was writing the Add-in for. When I learned of the answer, this is what I posted, in case I ran into issue in the future.
I thought that I'd post this here, so
that I would have reference, and also
in case anyone else would need
reference to it for the future... I'm
working on another Dinerware Add-on
using WPF, and although it was running
fine on my development machine, every
time I'd go to run it on a test
machine (a machine ghosted like it was
in the field at a customer's
location), I kept getting weird
processing errors.
I did hours of searching online, only
to come up empty handed until I ran
across this article:
http://social.msdn.microsoft.com/Forums/en-US/wpf/thread/6e5de3d8-fc02-4504-b00f-7a2192d24a48/
which gives a link to the download of
the WIC (Windows Imaging Components),
located here:
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=8e011506-6307-445b-b950-215def45ddd8&displaylang=en
For some reason, what is/was happening
is that the Windows Imaging components
have become corrupt against what my
application is looking for. TO fix
the issue, you have to:
1) navigate to
%windir%\$NtUninstallWIC$\spuninst\
and run the spuninst.exe file in
there. That will remove the Windows
imaging components. 2) after you have
completely removed the components, you
will then re-install them using the
second link from above.
So far, I've not run into any further
issues.
What a crazy thing that
was?!?!?!?!?!?!!
Hopefully, if someone else runs into this issue, I may be able to help them out quick by >putting this out there.
As I said on that forum... hopefully this helps someone else out that runs into this issue in the future.
I've done a bit more experimentation and built a test WPF project and used a Setup and Deployment project instead of a WiX installer. for some reason, the application is working fine when its installed with the Setup and Deployment installer, but when using WiX, it's having issues...
Beginning to think the issue has to do with WiX, and not the .Net Fx version/build
You can have this problem sometimes with templates and Blend, although I thought it had been fixed in the latest Blend. Basically when Blend "pulls in" information for making a new template, it can sometimes copy in Aero only stuff from Vista, which means the control you then create is then reliant on Vista :-(
I did think this was fixed though, although you may have been bitten by it if the project has taken a while to put together.
Make sure that .NET Version on your Vista and XP machine are same.

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