An Interesting Bug

Friday, June 25, 2010

Earlier today, one of my co-workers was running into a very strange bug: Every time he clicked the "build" button in Visual Studio, his screens would go black for up to 10 seconds. This would also happen when he updated his web services references, which is constant since we're developing new web service methods.

The IT staff re-installed the graphics drivers and checked the connections to the monitors, but all was well. Finally, I thought of a possible connection: both actions use command-line applications behind the scenes. Normally you can't see them, but my co-worker had been using full-screen mode for some command-line oracle work he was doing.

I told him to run cmd, and sure enough, the screen went black for a few seconds. Once the console set reset to windowed mode, the problem disappeared.