Deep Insights in Microsoft .NET

I had a problem in the production environment of a major customer recently. Windows 2008 R2 without SP1 and some updates, and C# stopped working. Basically, when I used AddRange() to transfer values from one collection to the other, the value did not go across. Note - the value did not go across. The source and target collection had one item in it, but in the source, there was a value, in the target it was NULL or BLANK. I verified that the source collection had a value which was not null and not blank and not whitespace - many people verified over and over again that this was so. This was logged to the file, both using my regular logging and also with a string builder. Many people verified, and reviewed that indeed, the C# executable was failing to copy over a value which it was saying is not null, blank or whitespace to another collection. We rebooted the server, installed .NET Framework updates - but every time this code would behave exactly the same way. Finally to fix ...

Had a problem where screen was blank on my PC. I wanted to install another OS. This is an issue because Windows 8 boots so fast, it does not show the boot options. I switched on and off several times... did not work. Then, I removed the power plug and put it in again. Now, when the machine started up, it did show the boot option. I did not have to install another OS, then it started working fine. Weird issue. Update : Turns out that is not what fixes the problem. Basically no matter what you do, it won't show the boot screen. Until you put a bootable disk for another OS into the CD tray. Then looks like Windows 8 shows the boot screen because it thinks you want to install something else. Nice workaround!