Thursday, February 14, 2008

Connecting to an Access Database in Visual Studio 2008 Server Explorer

Trying to connect to an MS Access DB from the visual studio 2008 Server Explorer gave me a little surprise to see that the window I got to create the connection only gave me the possibility to type in the connectionstring myself.

Trying several possibilities, the test connection button always cleamed the connection was OK, but when clicking OK i received the following message :

format of the initialization string does not conform to specification starting at index 0
After a long search, the solution was found, something is incorrect in the registry :
- Open the registry using regedit
- Find the  "HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT\CLSID\{F9AE8980-7E52-11d0-8964-00C04FD611D7}"  in the tree
- Check if there is a subkey named ProgID there, if there is, you are not having the same problem as I had, but be sure to check the value

If the key is not there, add it :
- Right click the node and click new, key
- Name it ProgID
- Select the newly created key
- In the main (right) pane, doubleclick the "(Default)" value
- Set its value to "MSIDXS.1" (without the quotes ofcourse).

Now when you create a new connection to an access DB, you can use the correct window.

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