Patrick Steele's .NET Blog

Thanks for the tip Nino!

I wanted to do a little research on using SQL Server Compact Edition (SSCE) today.  I downloaded it and installed it.  No problem.  I then downloaded the SSCE tools for Visual Studio 2005 SP1.  I tried to install these and was greeted with a most unpleasant message:

"The upgrade patch cannot be installed by the Windows Installer service because the program to be upgraded may be missing, or the upgrade patch may update a different version of the program. Verify that the program to be upgraded exists on your computer and that you have the correct upgrade patch."

I was thinking a reinstall of SP1 might be worth it, but that took forever the first time I did it so I didn't want to repeat that process.  I started searching the blogs and came across this post by mobility guru Nino Benvenuti.  He had a much quicker and easier solution (which he only found after doing a reinstall of SP1 himself):

From the original Visual Studio installation media, locate the \WCU folder and install SQL Mobile from there. 

Once I did this, I retried the install and it worked!  Thanks Nino -- you saved me a bunch of time!

Saving Color values

Here's an interesting thread on saving Color values to a database as integers.  The original poster was having issues going back and forth between the Color structure and the database integers.  In the end, it turns out .NET has a class designed to help you out in this scenario: The ColorTranslator class.  Check it out if you run into this type of situation.

Julie Lerman coming to town!

I just found out that Julie Lerman will be speaking here in Michigan at our local .NET User Group on Wednesday, July 18th!  She'll be giving us an overview of Microsoft's ADO.NET Entity Framework.  I've heard so many good things about Julie's presentations and I can't wait to see it.

This is one you won't want to miss.