I yearn for a development environment that just works together.

No competing technologies and conflicting software that doesn’t like to play well with one another, and no hours upon hours wasted fighting configurations before I can even start the work that I’m supposed to be working on all this time!!!

So in other words, the opposite of how I’ve spent the better part of the last two days. 😥

The environment that I run for my day job is very Microsoft-centric – SQL Server, Visual Studio, etc… – however we pull a lot of data from other teams, most of which use Oracle databases, not SQL Server. And granted, a lot of my experience previous to this role was actually in using MySQL because everything I did was web-based using Linux & PHP (not day job), but whereas I’ve managed to get used to the idiosyncrasies of SQL Server over the years, one thing that is always a giant pain in the ass is getting Microsoft and Oracle to play nice together.

In fact, up until recently I’ve somehow managed to dodge having the Oracle drivers setup on my current machine after upgrading, but now I need it to work … and it doesn’t want to … at least not with Visual Studio … and there’s even a special set of developer tools designed just for Visual Studio now and everything.

And I’ve run into these issues with Oracle before – where some stupid, random file or obscure registry setting is what your software has managed to latch onto and thus it refuses to recognize the newer version that you’re trying to upgrade to!

All I want to do is setup the latest Oracle drivers to work with Visual Studio so that I can pull data from Oracle databases into my own SQL Server db. This shouldn’t be that difficult.

If you hadn’t guessed already, I’ll be continuing on with this same task again tomorrow because I still haven’t conquered this battle just yet… 

Grrrrrrr, indeed!

🙁