Visual Studio 2013 connection with Firebird

Question

Though this is not programming specific problem, I hope this is also the right place to ask this.

I'm having problems using Firebird DB with Visual Studio.

I had previously installed FirebirdClient v4.2.0.0 and DDEX v3.0.1.0, but in my project I used newest version of client and there was a mismatch between the two when adding new ADO.net models (connection in Databases window was working perfectly fine).

So I uninstalled the v4.2 and installed newest version (4.6.2.0), but now when I try to add new connection:

Visual Studio 2013 Pro crashes after entering one letter into any of the textboxes:

I tried:

• relaunching VS
• reinstalling both FirebirdClient v.4.6.2 and DDEX v.3.0.1

but nothing seems to help. Anything I missed I can do to make this work?

I had also downloaded some NuGet packages, but since I even tried this with closed solution I don't suppose this is project-related issue.

Some further notes:

• I've read about GAC and the need of adding the assemblies into it, but as far as I understand, in the newest versions of Firebird .Net Provider it is done automatically

My specs:

• Win 8.1 Pro
• VS Pro 2013
• Firebird 2.5.2
• FB .Net Provider 4.6.2
• DDEX 3.0.1

Answer 1

I had the same Problem and the solution was to uninstall the DDEX 3.0.1 and FB.Net Provider. Remove all Firebird entries from the machine.config provider section. Reinstall both and it should work again, the uninstaller of the Provider doesn't remove this entries so Visual Studio crashes.

The machine config is located under:

32-bit %windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework[version]\config\machine.config

64-bit

%windir%\Microsoft.NET\Framework64[version]\config\machine.config