I’ve already fixed the problem and I’m reviewing the emails. Please accept my apologies if you contacted me and I didn’t answer. You’ll be hearing from me soon.

The Decision

After carefully considering all the options and talking to our customers, partners, and MVPs it was decided to deprecate OracleClient as a part of our ADO.NET roadmap. 

I kind of understand this decision, they want to improve ADO.NET but don’t want to invest resources supporting other competing database systems. However, I think this is very inconvenient for .NET developers in general. This will force us to research which vendor has the appropriate library and pay for it. And of course, take another external dependency.

Good news for those vendors though.

If you try to document many DTS packages, the resulting HTML file could be so big that can take a while to load and render by the browser.

With this new version, you can split the documentation in various files, one per package. DTSDoc generates an index file automatically linking every package documented.

I think this feature will alleviate some customers which where having problems due the gigantic files produced by DTSDoc in some scenarios.

Please download DTSDoc 1.2.5; the installer will automatically upgrade any previous version, so there’s no need to uninstall anything.

It turns out that the WiX tutorial states it clearly:

We also have to include the icon we want to use in the shortcuts. Note that the Id identifier has to carry the same extension as the target file, in this case, .exe:

<icon Id=”Foobar10.exe” SourceFile=”FoobarAppl10.exe” />

This will store the source file separately in the final installation package (so, if you refer to your main executable, you will end up with two copies). If the size of the file is large enough to cause concern, create a small .exe or .ico containing nothing but the icons.

(Emphasis mine)

Of course, I was extracting the icon directly from my executable. That is 550 KB for dbdesc and 280 KB for dtsdoc. In fact, it was much worse, because I had an additional reference to the executable for a second icon. The net result is that I was adding one additional megabyte to the dbdesc installer and about 500 KB to dtsdoc.

So, remember to reference directly an icon instead of your executable and you will save bandwidth and download time.

I’ve been using a beta version of codekana for several weeks and once you have used it for just some hours you just can’t go on without it. The color-coded flow control, the graphical outlines and the smart highlighting adds another level of ‘quick understanding’ to your code. But don’t take my word on this; just try it out for a couple of days or so and then press Ctrl-Shift-Alt-K to deactivate codekana. It’s a weird sensation. Press Ctrl-Shift-Alt-K to bring life to your code again.

This add-in could look as a nice-to-have one until you try it, then, it becomes a must-have.

By the way, it’s only $39 for limited time!

Msg. 15138 The database principal owns a database role and cannot be dropped

So it looked like the user owned a database schema. To find out the schemas that a user owns I’ve used this query:

SELECT * FROM INFORMATION_SCHEMA.SCHEMATA WHERE schema_owner = 'UserName'

UserName was the owner of the dbo_owner schema, so to return the schema to the original owner I’ve executed this other query:

ALTER AUTHORIZATION ON SCHEMA::db_owner TO dbo

Then I’ve been able to drop the user without problems.

To begin with, this exception cannot be catched, which means you don’t get a nice call stack or any other useful info to track down the problem.

If you dig in MSDN you will find this explanation: “The exception that is thrown when there is an internal error in the execution engine of the common language runtime.”, not very helpful.

Finally if you google about it, you’ll find lots of exasperated people looking for answers but almost no solutions at all. One thing that seems to share all those posts is that they are trying to do some kind of interop with COM objects.

To make a long story short, it was a bug in the Microsoft DTS libraries that dtsdoc uses to inspect and document DTS packages. The bug is fixed in SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 4, so updating those libraries solved the problem.

So, if you run into some RuntimeExecutionException, check your unmanaged libraries first, chances are that any of those libraries has a bug.

Now, he has just released ViEmu for Microsoft Word and ViEmu for Microsoft Outlook! There’s only one word: AMAZING!

Congratulations!

Although this version comes with lots of improvements and changes, I think that dbdesc should be able to document 2.0 databases without problems. I will try to find time this very weekend to test it.

Here are the release notes and download page.

UPDATE: Even though you can connect with a Firebird 2.0 server to document a database, using the local (embedded) connection does not work because it needs the new fbembed.dll version. I’ve uploaded a maintenance release (2.0.1) to address this issue. Installer size has grown a little (~1 MB) because of the updated Firebird libraries.

I just can not imagine receiving thousands of spam emails every single day. I’m not even close to that amount of emails. I used to receive less than one hundred per day (fingers crossed!).

To deal with them, I use SpamAssassin. It is setup to tag and redirect emails to a special account. Periodically, my email client downloads those emails to a SPAM folder and I inspect those tagged emails once a day. The inspection is pretty straightforward as most of the times the subject line is enough to decide if it is spam or not.

This system is working for me, but again, I receive a moderate amount of email each day.