These are some of the errors that I have run into that have made me either laugh hysterically or want to punch someone. I will add more as I find them, right now the collection is not that impressive (I think I have more, just can’t find them yet).

InvalidCastException

This error occurred when I wasn’t even dealing with a number. I think it must have been an inner exception or something that trickled its way up… somehow. Very irritating.

VS2008 Catastrophic failure

This I just found to be funny. This was due to a Visual Studio 2008 bug,  it is hard to explain  how it would happen, but when it would  I would crack up. To fix it just delete all of your break points or ditch your solution file. CATASTROPHIC FAILURE!!!!!

VS 2008 debugger

I would see this every time I would try to install visual studio 2008. Visual Studio was installed for the most part but the debugger wasn’t!

SQL Server 2008 installer error

During the SQL Server 2008 R2 all in one installer (or maybe it is another one?) this would happen. Who would have know that deleting the exact folder it is complaining about would have fixed the problem!

Aggregation of strings

This is a legitimate error, my gripe with it though is that it could have had a useful tip along with it like: “Hey stupid you are trying to sum a string column!” and then tell you WHICH column is the culprit. Sometimes you don’t realize that your number column is accidentally being treated as a string column. Stuff happens.

VS2010 Catastrophic failure

Yay Visual Studio 2010 still has continued the Catastrophic Failure error message box! This happens when a file cannot be located and you double click on the error message to view the missing file. CATASTROHPIC!!!

Blank message

This is a magical error… because you don’t know what you are agreeing or disagreeing to. Thanks Outlook 2010.

VS extension error

I got this error while editing HTML for an ASP.Net web app. It happens more frequently than I’d like. Pretty useless because it tells you that you can log it after it happens. Why not show me the error message at least?

UInt32 either too small or large

TFS 2012 returns this error in Visual Studio 2012 when you have not really saved your files that you are trying to check in. Do a save all, a build or both. Wow… what an error message.

Service unavailable 500 error

This is by far one of the most useless errors of all time. It tells you nothing because the problem causing it is just so broad. It can be a lot of different factors.

Unspecified error

Visual Studio 2012 returns this error when you are having a problem with your solution TFS bindings and you just continuously ignore the errors about needing to fix your bindings. Eventually VS gets fed up I guess and this is the best it can spout back at you.

VS2015 inconsistent length calculation

Visual Studio 2015 returns this error after corrupting your source *.cshtml file with a botched rename operation. Read about it here. It would have been nice if they could have provided a line number of what was causing the problem.

VS2017 HRSULT: 0x8455C36E

Visual Studio 2017 returns this error, for what seems to be randomly, when you save your markup file. Difficult to reproduce and easy to ignore since it is so detailed.

Server Busy

Windows 10 pre version 1903 had this incredibly annoying problem where what felt like every 10 minutes to an hour this stupid pop up should show up because the start menu couldn’t make a connection to something. Very annoying and very disruptive. You could not close this dialogue by pressing the “x” in the corner. You had to press “Switch To…” and then the start menu would sometimes pop up.

RDP time difference

I have never seen this happen before with remote deskatop. The system admin that I was working with has also never seen this happen before. It was truly a bizarre issue. I am not sure what he did to fix it, but he didn’t restart the machine. He could RDP to the box, but not me.

RDP protocol error

Windows version 1909 has a bunch of really weird problems with RDP. This happens to be one of them as it falls in line with the sporadic freezing and disconnects I keep experiencing.

Publish has encountered an error

Got this error when all I was trying to do was publish a dot net core 2.1 application to a local folder from VS2019. The diagnostics log was as useless as the provided error. This is why I still say to this day, “Dot net core is undercooked”.

The index was outside the bounds of the array

We have all seen this error before, but this is specifically was was happening when trying to open VS 2019 solutions with VS 2022. Not sure if they fixed it or not by now, but I didn’t take too long to figure it out I just recreated my solution.