This was a weird issue that a coworker had that I thought I would re-post so others (and I) could find it easily when it comes up again. We were adding a report via the report wizard. Visual Studio (apparently) attempts to load the data sources you may have sitting in your Bin folder. If it cannot load one of those (for some reason), it will fail to bring up the report wizard (where you may be creating a new data source anyway).

The solution feels a lot like a hack (but this is Microsoft, right – comes with the territory).

Rename your Bin folder, then run your wizard, then rename it back.

Just wow.

I got this solution from here.

LinqPad – Get Pdf from binary column

A friend asked me to share this technique (which rocks!) for a simple way to pull a pdf from a table without writing an application to do it. It has saved me a lot of time when I need to get to a stored pdf quickly.

LinqPad (which if you do any Linq, and in this case even if you just need to get to a binary object) is a must-have program that allows you to do this.

Here is the simple code snippet that pulls the pdf, saves it to a file, and opens it. You have to connect your database on the top right, and select “C# Statements” in the middle drop down list:

string id = "60821 003";
string dir = "C:\\TempDocs";

// create output directory
Directory.CreateDirectory(dir);

// create output filename
string outputPDFFile = Path.Combine(dir, id + ".pdf");

// find the record we want (you have to be connected 
// to the database you want to search, and
// PDFDocuments below must match the table you are pulling data from
var mypdf = (from q2 in PDFDocuments where q2.PrintBatchId == id select q2);

// above returns only one record, so below I use SingleOrDefault to get that record.
// otherwise here you could iterate through the records...
// the ".Pdf portion pf this is the column name of the pdf binary data in the table
File.WriteAllBytes(outputPDFFile, mypdf.SingleOrDefault().Pdf.ToArray());

// this part opens up the pdf for viewing / verifying I have the right one
System.Diagnostics.Process proc = new System.Diagnostics.Process();
proc.EnableRaisingEvents = false;
proc.StartInfo.FileName = outputPDFFile;
proc.Start();

Have fun!

LINQ to SQL and missing Many to Many EntityRefs – Rick Strahl’s Web Log

Just a quick note: If you are attempting to create a relationship between two tables using a foreign key and use it in Linq to SQL, it is not enough that there is a non-primary key defined in that table. The relationship will show up on the designer but not in the actual code. Linq to SQL requires that there be a primary key defined, even if it is not used in the relationship.

More info at link below:

LINQ to SQL and missing Many to Many EntityRefs – Rick Strahl’s Web Log.