SSIS: OperationName property does not stick

While in design-time building your SSIS package there a property called OperationName under the FTP Task (FtpTask Class). Unfortunately setting this property, saving and reopening the designer shows this property resetting back to blank. Jamie Thompson was kind enough to help me confirm this bug is not just a local issue on my machine, but seems to be the current (SQL Server 2005 SP2 / Visual Studio 2005 SP1) behavior.

The big question you might have is "what the heck is this property?". Its a good question as this property does not seem to be used anywhere.

Here is the official MSDN definition:

FtpTask.OperationName Property

Gets or sets a unique name for the File Transfer Protocol (FTP) task.

Namespace: Microsoft.SqlServer.Dts.Tasks.FtpTask
Assembly: Microsoft.SqlServer.FtpTask (in microsoft.sqlserver.ftptask.dll)

The reason I came across the need to use this property is the FtpTask class. This class does not expose an ID, Name, or Description property to help uniquely identify the instance of the FtpTask, therefore this property seemed perfect, but it does not work.

ShowBalloonTip Problem in notifyIcon Control (Visual Studio 2008)

Today I thought I found a bug in Visual Studio 2008 while coding a Windows Application. Using the NotifyIcon control I displayed a Balloon Tip using the ShowBalloonTip method. The Balloon displayed without issue but did not vanish after 2 seconds (2000 milliseconds, as show below).

Code Sample:

notifyIconMain.ShowBalloonTip(2000, "My Text", MyVariable, ToolTipIcon.Info);

Reason:

Googling this problem shows various posts talking about this as a known issue. Unfortunately the link that talked about this issue on MSDN Forum was for some reason unavailable with an IIS error but Google saved the day with the cached version.

To summarize this seems to be due to operation system "features" and not a Visual Studio 2008 issue. These features include:

• Notifications don't vanish if no user interface actions are detected to prevent the user from missing notifications when they are away from the machine
• Depending on your OS there might will be a minimum display time enforced on the balloon tip

If I move my mouse around after the notification appears my Windows XP SP2 is confirmed set at about 10 seconds (courtesy of iPhone Stopwatch) as the minimum and therefore any setting lower seems to do nothing

Additional Notes: Trying to do more tests and time the amount of time the balloon took to vanish results in inconsistent time-to-vanish durations... odd... more on this later