Microsoft: where even software software development tools fail at regionalization

I’ve wondering why the Visual Profiler in the WPF Performance Profiling Tool has never worked for me whilst others could run it fine. When I found the solution last night, I almost fell out of my chair. Here I was thinking the Zune location-restriction was absurd.

Update (6/14/2010):

We heard that few folks complain that the Visual Profiler cannot correctly attach to the WPF application in the new WPFPerf for WPF 4.

After some research we think this has to do with a bug in our DateTime initialization which cause anyone in a time zone > GMT to not get any data in VisualProfiler (for a few hours at least).

Until we post a fix, a temporary workaround is to set your time zone < [Long: corrected] GMT (e.g.to Eastern or Pacific Standard Time Zones) when you first attach VisualProfiler.

Seriously.

8 insightful thoughts

  1. heh, i was just trying to use that the other day AND gave up after an hour of head banging! Thanks for the post and definetely fell of my chair reading that too!

  2. For many years the BAM spreadsheet tool that shipped with BizTalk would only work if your regional settings were set to EN-US – and that was an Excel bug – their flagship product.

  3. I still keep “fondly” memories of the (VB6-) tool that shipped with Windows DDK and was required to digitally sign drivers. This beast worked only when your machine Regional settings were set to USA. It did some date calculations and couldn’t parse dates otherwise. It took me *days* to figure out how to make the damned thing works.

Comments are closed.