Visual Studio 2013 EditorPackage Did Not Load Correctly

One minute - Sep 2, 2014
#microsoft#visual-studio

One of the things that continually conspires to drive me away from Microsoft products and towards those that are free and open source are the random bugs that pop up from time to time in their incredibly expensive software. The other day, I had to restart my Windows development system and discovered I had an issue when I tried to start Visual Studio 2013. When Visual Studio tried to start and open any files that had been previously open or that I wanted to open for the first time, I got this error message: The ‘Microsoft.VisualStudio.Editor.Implementation.EditorPackage’ package did not load correctly.

Evidently, this error is fairly common, and tends to cause issues with the ComponentModelCache folder. The solution to get Visual Studio again able to open all types of text code files is to close Visual Studio and rename or delete yoru ComponentModelCache folder. This folder is located at %LOCALAPPDATA%\Microsoft\VisualStudio\12.0. Please note that you will lose some customizations that you have made to Visual Studio, the most obvious of which is the list of files that you had open for each solution the last time you closed that solution.

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Apr 11, 2014

2 minutes

How Not to Use SQL Transactions

SQL Transactions allow you to isolate atomic operations so that you can ensure that a third party does not update the data affected during the atomic operation protected by the transaction. An example of an operation that you would want to protect with a SQL Transaction would be transferring funds from one bank account to another. The first step of this operation would be to subtract the funds from bank account A. Once complete, we would then add the same amount of funds to bank account B. Assuming nothing fails, everything works as expected. However, if there is other database activity at the same time or an error occurs in one of the queries, without a transaction you could have the funds removed from bank account A or added to bank account B, but not both, causing a major balancing issue with your bank accounts.

#microsoft #sql-server

Apr 10, 2014

2 minutes

Unexpected Results with SQL Server and Python pyodbc

Using the Microsoft SQL Server Management Studio (SSMS) with SQL Server hides many of the API complications that can sometimes arise when working with SQL Server. One specific example would be when using Python on Windows with the pyodbc driver. If you have an update statement that performs a simple update to a status column and a datetime column, you can have some unexpected results.

Lets say that the table you are running the update against has a before update trigger and an after update trigger configured on it. Both triggers effectively do the same thing, as they log the current affected row to a second, logging table, peforming separate insert statements to do so. When running this update statement in SSMS, it seems to behave as you would expect, with a single result set returned, but listing three sets of (1 row updated) for every row that was updated. When using Python’s pyodbc driver to run this exact same SQL update statement, it shows that only 1 row was updated when there should have been many updated.

#microsoft #sql-server #python

Apr 9, 2014

One minute

SQL Server Transaction Log Exponential Growth

There are few things more frustrating than seemingly random issues that crop up in software when configuration changes occur. One such occurrence is when you migrate your databases from Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition to Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition with High Availability and the transaction log suddenly begins to experience exponential growth without ceasing.

It turns out that when using Python and pyodbc on Windows to access SQL Server, there can be some unpredictable results. If you have a long-running SQL query that you are running from Python and pyodbc, when you are running it against a Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Standard Edition database, it will fail and time out silently, making Python think that the query succeeded. On the other hand, if you run the same long-running SQL query from Python and pyodbc in Microsoft SQL Server 2012 Enterprise Edition with High Availability, it will fail and rollback the query, but will fill the transaction log.