Tim Mackey's Weblog

coming from the c# world of strict control flow and built-in bail-out for unhandled exceptions, i was caught out by something in SQL 2005 recently.
many of my stored procedures take this form:

    update sometable set whatever = @whatever
    exec SP_History 'joe bloggs', 'order taken', '€500'

i was assuming that if the update statement failed, the subsequent SP_History SP would not be executed.  however i was wrong, and i now have the following code where i want the SP to stop executing if something goes wrong:

if @@ERROR <> 0 
    RETURN @@ERROR    -- bail out

the exception is still caught by .net, any handling code you may have will be unaffected there by the return statement.

The full error i got was below:

Error    35    The type 'CrystalDecisions.Shared.ExportFormatType' exists in both 
'c:\Windows\assembly\GAC\CrystalDecisions.Shared\9.1.5000.0__692fbea5521e1304\CrystalDecisions.Shared.dll' and 
'c:\Windows\assembly\GAC_MSIL\CrystalDecisions.Shared\10.2.3600.0__692fbea5521e1304\CrystalDecisions.Shared.dll'   

The reason is because version 9 and 10 of crystal reports are installed on my dev box and VS needed help deciding which one to use.  the fix was to specify the exact assembly binding to use in web.config, as follows:

	<runtime>
		<assemblyBinding xmlns="urn:schemas-microsoft-com:asm.v1">
			<dependentAssembly>
				<assemblyIdentity name="CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Engine" publicKeyToken="692fbea5521e1304" />
				<bindingRedirect oldVersion="9.1.5000.0" newVersion="10.2.3600.0"/>
			</dependentAssembly>
			<dependentAssembly>
				<assemblyIdentity name="CrystalDecisions.CrystalReports.Shared" publicKeyToken="692fbea5521e1304" />
				<bindingRedirect oldVersion="9.1.5000.0" newVersion="10.2.3600.0"/>
			</dependentAssembly>
			<dependentAssembly>
				<assemblyIdentity name="CrystalDecisions.Shared" publicKeyToken="692fbea5521e1304" />
				<bindingRedirect oldVersion="9.1.5000.0" newVersion="10.2.3600.0"/>
			</dependentAssembly>
		</assemblyBinding>
	</runtime>

thanks to rick ersek for the solution.

CAST(FLOOR(CAST(GetDate() AS FLOAT)) AS SmallDateTime)

Cheers to this blogger, he explains why it works.

my Visual Source Safe database had grown very large and i couldn't see why.  digging around in the aaaaaaamb.a files revealed an episode of robin-hood that had accidentally been checked in to VSS.  the thing was i had deleted it through VS but it hadn't been purged from VSS.  with the VSS graphical interface, you can right-click any folder and it will tell you in the deleted items tab if there are any deleted (but not yet purged) items.  however this is very time-consuming.
thanks to a post on a newsgroup, i discovered the command line interface, which has an option to list deleted files, and you can then purge them. you still have to scan through the output, which is presented in a very crude way to say the least.  if there are deleted files, you would think it should just list them.  but no, it lists every directory and says 'no items found under ...' after it, which makes for a lot of noise when you are trying to scan for directories that actually contain deleted files. 
anway, here's the commands:

set SSDIR=C:\Data\VSS                                        ** the folder containing of your srcsafe.ini file **
cd "C:\Program Files\Microsoft Visual SourceSafe\"
ss dir -R -D $/*.*