I'm working...hmm...thought I'd mention a very odd bug I came across yesterday at work - which had me puzzled for about a day and a half...

I had written an application (the Portal I've mentioned before - The Education Community), which uses the Data Access Application Blockto provide the DAL - which I highly recommend. Anyway, this has always been faultless on every platform I've tried it on. The code is below...

    string user = System.Security.Principal.WindowsIdentity.GetCurrent().Name;
    string exceptionStr=exception.ToString() + exception.StackTrace;
    SqlParameter[] sqlParams = new SqlParameter[4]; SqlParameter
    prmUser = new SqlParameter("@user",SqlDbType.VarChar,500);
    prmUser.Value = user;
    SqlParameter prmMessage = new SqlParameter("@exceptionMessage",
    SqlDbType.VarChar, 2000);
    prmMessage.Value = exception.Message;
    SqlParameter prmExStr = new SqlParameter("@exception",SqlDbType.Text);
    prmExStr.Value = exceptionStr;
    SqlParameter prmPortalId = new SqlParameter("@portalId",SqlDbType.SmallInt);
    prmPortalId.Value = 0; sqlParams[0] = prmUser;
    sqlParams[1] = prmMessage;
    sqlParams[2] = prmExStr; 
    sqlParams[3] = prmPortalId;
    /*SqlHelperParameterCache.GetSpParameterSet(_connectionString,"pr_Admin_InsertError");  sqlParams[0].Value
    = user;  sqlParams[1].Value = exception.Message;  sqlParams[2].Value
    = exceptionStr;  //sqlParams[2].Value = "Test String";  sqlParams[3].Value
    = ((PortalSettings)HttpContext.Current.Items["PortalSettings"]).PortalId;*/ 
    SqlHelper.ExecuteNonQuery(_connectionString,CommandType.StoredProcedure,"pr_Admin_InsertError",sqlParams);

I use a method it provides called SqlHelperParameterCache.GetSpParameters (commented out in the code above) - this basically just populates an array of SqlParameters with the parameters returned from the DB - saves a bit of coding and makes the app easier to update as the SPs change - nice!

Anyway, this has worked faultlessly, fast, efficient all of that! Until that is, I tried to deploy to our test environment on Thursday - I kept getting various errors, Severe Error and General Network error back from SQL Server 2000 when I tried to run the commented code above. Well, the version of .NET on that machine was 1.0.3705.352

• a version I'd never seen and can't get - but I assumed, .NET 1.0 was all pretty much the same, maybe a few bugfixes but thats' about it!

Umm...wrong, turns out this version has a major issue when you try to get the parameters back from an SP when the SP expects a 'text' type field - it just gets it wrong somehow

• and causes this awful, puzzling error. Solution, explicitly declare the field types for the parameters if your SP contains a 'text' field (only one I've tried it for, may affect more  'binary' types).

Anyway, fixed now - but I do recommend you upgrade to 1.1 - which also has a fantastic thing I discovered from some blokes blog at the ASP.NET weblogs simple but saves a bit of typing, seems that DropDownList (I expect RadioButtonList has it too, but not tried it!) that is a SelectedValue property - how cool is that - well not that cool, but its' better than doing the old ddl.SelectedItem.Value...bit shorter...