Unable to cast COM object of type...

Was the error that bugged me for three days, any time I tried to connect to a database in SQL Server Management Studio. Re-installing the Management Studio or the whole SQL Server wasn't working. Neither the workarounds for registering some specific DLLs, or event (gasp!) changing some GUIDs in the registry. What eventually fixed my problem was running the following command in the command prompt (Administrator Mode) and rebooting:

sfc /scannow

(SFC stands for System File Checker)

It's kind of weird that this issue has been around since 2005, officially reported to Microsoft in 2009 and it's still bugging people today (like me) using Windows 7, Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server 2008 R2. For the record here is where I found the fix.

Yet Another Hello World

Here is my third blog on software development. Unlike my previous instalments, "Labs" @ XAML-PT and "Labs 2" @ pontoNETpt, this is not dependent on any community, nor will be in Portuguese. Nor it will be called "Labs 3", just my name and where my work mostly is around - .NET. It's a better choice for SEO purposes :) In terms of content, this will mostly follow "Labs 2", basically logging my experiments and issue fixing, in case I might need it in the future, and in the hope that it might useful for someone else.
Regarding my previous blogging, XAML-PT is lost and pontoNETpt is currently down, although it is expected to be up again in the near future (here). My old entries on my personal blog regarding .NET are still available here (in Portuguese).

Patterns & Practices: Application Architecture Guide 2.0

This week the book Application Architecture Guide 2.0 - Designing Applications on the .NET platform was released.



This book is from the Patterns & Practices (P&P) team and is edited by Microsoft Press. It is available for free download. I have known that the P&P team has developed some interesting work on software engineering, by I haven't found the time to actually read something from them. This book might be my chance to do so. I opened it up a little bit and found a foreword from non other than Scott Guthrie, a very active engineer in the .NET community.

By the way, some previous reading material from P&P include two interesting topics: Performance Testing Guidance for Web Applications and Team Development with Visual Studio Team Foundation Server.

Until next time, may you enjoy some free reading.