Cleaning up after a rough week with Oracle

kellyb — Sun, 14 Feb 2010 23:18:48 GMT

I had a pretty rough week attempting to get the Oracle client installed on my Windows 7 – 64bit machine. I’m going resist the temptation to throw stones, but let’s just say it was a frustrating week.

Today I went to the Server Explorer in Visual Studio 2008 to do some work with the ADO.NET Entity Framework. When attempting to connect the designer to my local SQL Server, I immediately received this

An unexpected error occurred in the Oracle Data Provider for .NET. Please contact the provider vendor to resolve this problem.

Siiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiigh

Even though I’ve uninstalled every trace of Oracle from my machine from the Add/Remove Programs dialog, Oracle seems to have failed to cleanup after itself and it’s still left some damaging residue in my registry.

It took a while and some googling to figure this out, but the solution is to find all occurrences of the following GUID in your Windows registry and delete each one. I found about 25 of these. After deleting them all and restarting Visual Studio, it looks like I’m back in business.

D601BB95-E404-4A8E-9F24-5C1A462426CE

Missing Status Bar in Visual Studio?

kellyb — Thu, 03 Sep 2009 17:14:31 GMT

From time to time, my status bar disappears. I used to believe this was due to a botched install or add-in. I recently upgraded to Team System Test Edition, and my status bar again disappeared. For the last few weeks I’ve been trying to figure out a time to do a full reinstall.

Today, I discovered this is a setting in Visual Studio (duh). So, if you see this:

and you can’t figure out how to get your status bar back, go to Tools –> Options –> Environment –> General section and check the “Show status bar” checkbox:

And you’ll have your status bar back:

visual studio

Cleaning up after a rough week with Oracle

Missing Status Bar in Visual Studio?