bugs

Cannot start with 'Log'

Anthony Trudeau — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 18:21:08 GMT

I found another oddity that seems to be undocumented today. This one in SQL Server 2005. Apparently, you cannot start objects (at least stored procedures) with the word "Log".

I have a table called ShipNoticeLog and a stored procedure called LogShipNotice. The table is the noun and the stored procedure is the action -- this is how I prefer to do the naming. My code quickly failed with the message, "Invalid object name 'LogShipNotice'..." I ended up solving my issue by renaming the stored procedure as AddShipNoticeLogEntry. A little more verbose, but it'll suffice.

By the way, I classify this as a bug not because there's anything wrong with the restriction, but the fact that it isn't documented or at the least clearly documented.

Expression Web: Not Enough Disk Space

Anthony Trudeau — Mon, 28 Jul 2008 09:40:55 GMT

Whenever I run into a weird bug or workaround I like to do a short post about it. Doing so helps the community and it is also self-serving in case I run into it a year or so later after I've long forgot about it. Today is one of those times.

My latest disk batch came for my MSDN subscription and I decided to upgrade Expression Blend and Web to version 2. Granted I haven't really used these tools too much, but I plan on doing so in the future. The installation of Blend went without a hitch, but Web failed indicating that I was out of disk space. I have about 40 GB free so I know that's not the issue.

A quick Web search on http://search.live.com (I don't like Google) led me to a forum post somewhere that explained that the problem seemed to be with Office. I wasn't going to go through that today, so I decided that perhaps it was something about the Office installation. The only thing that stood out to me was an add-in for saving to a PDF document. (My company is in love with the PDF format for same reason.)

Removing that would be easy enough, so I uninstalled it and tried the Expression Web installation again. Sure enough the installation completed without a problem. I then reinstalled the save to PDF add-in for Office and I was on my way again.

Why I hate Microsoft Access...

Anthony Trudeau — Tue, 15 Jul 2008 11:56:47 GMT

Today has been one of those days to hate Microsoft Access. My company has dozens of Microsoft Access applications in the enterprise that do everything under the sun. Eventually those will be replaced by me, but in the meantime I have to deal with them. Today was one of those days. In fact today I had two circumstances to reinforce those feelings.

The first came when I had to correct an ordering of results on a form that wasn't matching a report. The report was deemed correct, so I needed to view the design of its query to see how it was different. Immediately, I'm greeted by the warning that the designer cannot represent the join. (Not unexpected since the query is complex.) I click okay, get the information I want, close the query, fix the form ordering, and go on my merry way. That is until the email later.

The email with the attached report showing 18 pages for what should be two was the problem. What happened? Microsoft Access decided to fix the problem of its own volition. And not only that. Microsoft Access decided to save the query definition without a peep, prompt, or otherwise. And to make things worse, it did the same thing when I imported the query from a shadow copy and every other method I could think of. Eventually I had to manually change it. (I promptly made a backup that I can plop in place if needed; hopefully, Microsoft Access didn't silently fix my backup.)

The second was in relation to an Access project that is being put in place as I push the current data from Microsoft Access into Microsoft SQL Server. One of the constructs is a report with a simple subreport. The subreport represents a one-to-many relationship with a simple list of items corresponding to the main report. This shoud have been easy. My queries were tested in Management Studio and they run individually in the reports. However, when the subreport was added to the main report and run I got the error "Syntax error or access denied". Thanks for the information Microsoft. Obviously, the problem is in the subreport, because the main report shows.

Well, I start simplifying the reports and eventually get down to one with no joins in each. I still got the error. The problem? The SQL statement on my subreport is terminated with a semi-colon (by ANSI standards interestingly). I guess that's a syntax error, but in of itself it's not -- just when combined with another SQL statement through the main report.

So at the end of the day, Microsoft decided to change and save a query I didn't change myself, and inconsistently decided not to change the SQL statement that it could have easily changed on the subreport. My choice is for it not to change anything without me explicitly telling it, but if anything I would like some consistency.

Exception 80004005

Anthony Trudeau — Wed, 06 Dec 2006 20:04:00 GMT

"Exception 80004005" has to be the worse error description I've seen. This is not the error number, it's the description. I received this error today when I was working on some legacy Visual Basic script in VisiWatch (an EAI application developed by SoftBrands).

There is some sporadic information out there on this error. However, all of the guidance revolved around IIS code and suggested corruption, permissions, etc. Of course this guidance led me on a wild goose chase. After awhile I was able to isolate the problem to the specific SQL statement and not any type of connection method I was using (I was executing a Command and storing the result in a Recordset, and the connection was to a remote Access database that linked to another remote Access database -- so the setup is complex).

The problem? One of the fields in the table queried is named "Language". Apparently, ADO/OLEDB does not like that name and it fails with a totally useless error message. The problem was solved by escaping the field name.

Problems installing Office 2007

Anthony Trudeau — Wed, 15 Nov 2006 14:52:00 GMT

I got the following error when I tried to install Office 2007 Professional this morning:

The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies.

Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.

I had uninstalled all of the software except for Office 2003 Web Components which as it turns out needs to be uninstalled. I hoped for the best, but I still got the same error. In order to resolve it I had to dig into the temporary log file that the setup application creates in the temporary directory (C:\Documents and Settings\[Login Name]\Local Settings\Temp. The file was called something like SetupExe(2006....).log. Near the end of the file was the following text:

Catalyst beta product conflict check failed. Office Beta product conflict is detected on the computer, productcode={30120000-001F-0409-0000-0000000FF1CE}
Showing message Title: 'Setup Errors', Message: 'Setup is unable to proceed due to the following error(s):
The 2007 Microsoft Office system does not support upgrading from a prerelease version of the 2007 Microsoft Office system. You must first uninstall any prerelease versions of the 2007 Microsoft Office system products and associated technologies.
Correct the issue(s) listed above and re-run setup.
'
Message returned: 1
Error: Catalyst intermediate PreReqCheck has failed Type: PreReqCheckFailure.
Error: Catalyst intermediate PreReqCheck has failed Type: PreReqCheckFailure.
Error: Catalyst intermediate PreReqCheck has failed Type: PreReqCheckFailure.
Catalyst execution finished: 11/15/2006 10:26:19. Return code: 30066. Exception caught: PreReqCheckFailure.
PERF: TickCount=2456437 Name=RunSetup Description=End function

So, off to the Registry I went to delete every instance I could find for the listed product code. After clearing them out I restarted the setup application and everything worked fine. Hopefully, this information will be useful to someone else, because I couldn't find anything on the Internet about it.

Object Required (424) with Parameter collection

Anthony Trudeau — Sat, 28 Oct 2006 21:47:00 GMT

I've been racking my brain with an error for quite awhile now regarding adding a parameter to a collection for an ADO Command object. The scenario is that I have a SQL query called from Access against a SQL Server database that has one character parameter.

The relevant piece of code is:

Dim param As ADODB.Parameter
Set param = cmd.CreateParameter("@p1", adVarChar, adParamInput, 20, val)
cmd.Parameters.Append param

The ADO documentation for the CreateParameter method states:

This method does not automatically append the Parameter object to the Parameters collection of a Command object. This lets you set additional properties whose values ADO will validate when you append the Parameter object to the collection.

When I ran my test function it failed with Object Required and an error number of 424. I finally noticed that after I called CreateParameter that there was indeed a parameter in the collection. So it turns out that the ADO documentation in this case is wrong.

I was able to resolve the problem by directly instantiating the Parameter and then appending it to the collection -- that is I did not use the CreateParameter method.

Beware of System Restore

Anthony Trudeau — Fri, 19 May 2006 15:32:00 GMT

I'm at our Mexico user group this week and I had a heck of a day yesterday relating to System Restore. I've used System Restore in the past, but never had problems like this.

It started with a connection problem that was occurring on a closed loop network. The connection worked, but it took an awfully long time to connect to the web interface provided by a device on the network whereas a ping was almost instantaneous. At first I though IE7 might be to blame, so I rolled that back. No luck. I then reinstalled IE7 with no luck.

So, my next thought was to do a System Restore from the morning before my trip. It didn't solve the problem, and I quickly found out that System Restore restored the code in my solutions!

All of the changes which happened to be a few dozen bug fixes and over 40 unit tests all gone. This occurred with Visual Studio 2005 projects. I hadn't changed anything on Visual Studio 2003 projects, so I don't know if they are affected too.

Hopefully, this warning will remind someone to backup their code before doing a System Restore.

Could not find type

Anthony Trudeau — Thu, 20 Apr 2006 15:58:00 GMT

I stumbled onto what I would consider a bug in the Visual Studio 2005 IDE today. The issue came about after I rebuilt due to renaming a type that was used in a user control. After building I got an error when I attempted to load the user control in design mode. The error was:

Could not find type 'TypeName'. Please make sure that the assembly that contains this type is referenced. If this type is a part of your development project, make sure that the project has been successfully built.

The variable 'ControlName' is either undeclared or was never assigned.

It turns out that I had the assembly that was being built in the IDE also in the GAC. It needed to be in the GAC for testing that I was doing outside of the IDE. The problem went away after I uninstalled the library from the GAC.

I understand why the problem occurs, but in my opinion Visual Studio should not perform the normal assembly resolution -- especially when the type is internal to the project like it was in this example. Anyway, hopefully, this will help someone else out.