At my new gig, I am working on a project that is ASP.NET with an Oracle Database backend. Today I ran into an error.

Data provider internal error(-3000) [System.String]

What does this error mean? Heck if I know, its a generic error basically telling you that something is wrong with your connection to the database more than likely.

After troubleshooting code, the CSLA framework, more code, stored procs, queries, more code and testing everything I could think of, I decided it had to be something with the Oracle driver on my machine. I remembered back in the day when I worked for SCWH using Oracle 8 and having a hell of a time getting it to work if the driver was even a .1 release off, or if you were using the wrong driver.

Reinstalled the 10g client and Oracle Data Provider for .NET stuff and it worked. What a waste of time. Just another reason why I hate Oracle, and SQL Server is the way to go. No stupid dot releases of drivers that cause headaches. Granted MSFT used to have MDAC which was a major pain, but with .NET it just connects, and works.