Month: April 2012

It’s incredibly frustrating that this still happens, but it turns out that if you have Visual Studio 2010 and SQL Server Express 2008 (or R2) on your machine, and you uninstall SQL Server Express 2008 and install SQL Server Express 2012 instead, you’ll get an error trying to load database projects in Visual Studio 2010: “Could not load file or assembly ‘Microsoft.SqlServer.Management.SqlParser’”.

Why can’t SQL Server 2012 install the stuff it knows Visual Studio requires?  Fine, whatever.

The fix for this problem is the same as the last time I posted something like this:

1. Locate your Visual Studio 2010 installation media.
2. In the \WCU\DAC folder, you’ll find three MSIs: DACFramework_enu.msi, DACProjectSystemSetup_enu.msi, and TSqlLanguageService_enu.msi. Run and install each of them. (Possibly just the third one is required in this case.  I’m not sure.)
3. Reapply Visual Studio 2010 SP1.

You should be back to a working state.

This is mostly a note to myself so I don’t lose this awesome Visual Extension.

I hate C# #region tags in Visual Studio.  I hate opening a class file and then having to expand all the regions in order to read the code.  If you feel the need to use regions to make your class file more manageable, then it’s quite likely that your class is actually too big and desperately needs to be refactored.  Just . . . no.

But since not everyone is as enlightened as myself (ahem), sometimes I have to work with code that uses lots of #region tags.  In those cases where I can’t delete them all with extreme prejudice, I can at least install the excellent I Hate #Regions Visual Studio extension that will auto-expand regions whenever I open a file and will also display the #region tags in very small type so that they’re not as obnoxious.  Ah, relief!