I’m trying to use COM+ to manage database transactions in my unit tests.  All of a sudden, I start getting all these weird errors saying “Failed to generate type library.“  No clue what was going on. I ran “regasm“ over the unit test assembly and all was healed.  Weird, huh? -Ben   Failed to generate…

I think that I may have found a dirty little secret about Visual SourceSafe.  Most people never back it up and even fewer people ever try to restore it.  I made this discovery the hard way after running into big problems installing/uninstalling Visual Studio 2005 CTP and the latest version of SQL Server 2005.  I…

In my last post, I wrote about the process of discovering that my client’s SQL Server hadn’t had a single service pack applied to it.  We applied Service Pack 4 and good times were had by all….for about 12 hours.  The web applications all worked but then a .NET Windows application started serving up strange…

The last few days have been a little bit hellish.  I’ve been on-site at my client’s office helping them do a Windows 2000 to Windows 2003 migration, set up their new server, and deploy beta versions of the applications that I’ve been writing for them.  I backed up their SQL Server database from the old server…

My bank’s name just changed and although they insisted up and down that this would make no different to my life, they were wrong.  The name change killed my Quickbooks 2004 Online Banking integration.  I used to be able to download my bank statements right into Quickbooks…but that broke.  It said something like “cannot complete…

Ever get the feeling that IT recruiters are outsourcing phone work to India?  I keep getting these calls with TERRIBLE line quality from people with Indian accents asking if I’m available for work.  It’s like the agencies are cold calling everyone in their database on the off chance that someone’s available for some .NET work. …

As you can probably tell from previous posts, I’m feel pretty mixed about on the Microsoft Patterns & Practices Enterprise Library Data Access Block (MPAPELDAB, for short).  I like the design of the classes and I really like that you can access databases other than just SQL Server but I’m having some serious problems with registry…