OrchidWiz installation issue on Windows 7 64bit

[Discus]

Not sure if this will save anyone some head-scratching, but I finally got around to installing OrchidWiz on my home PC about a year after ordering it... and it didn't work.

Unlike my work machine, my home machine is a Windows 7 64 bit Ultimate Edition (and not venerable old 32 bit Windows XP!).

Essentially, I ran into horrible looking errors that complained about ADO.NET errors. Initially I thought "Hmm, must be a .net issue", but had I read the error more carefully, I would have seen it was actually a SQL Server Compact issue. Installing .net 3.5 again did nothing (not surprising, really...). *facepalm*

The errors (repeated several times) were along the lines of:

File version mismatch detected between ADO.NET Provide and native binaries of SQL Server Compact which could result in an incorrect functionality. This could be due to the presence of miltiple instances of SQL Server Compact of different versions. Please install SQL Server Compact binaries of matching version [ADO.NET Provider File Version = 3.5.5692.*, Native Binary File Version = 3.5.8080.*]

and

at System.Data.SqlServerCe.NativeMethods.CheckVersionMismatch(StringmodulePath)
at System.Data.SqlServerCe.NativeMethods.LoadNativeBinaries()
at System.Data.SqlServerCe.SqlCeConnection..ctor()
at System.Data.SqlServerCe.SqlCeConnection..ctor(String connectionString)
at OrchidWiz8.PictureDBWrapper.ConnectToImages()

I clicked OK though them, and OrchidWiz appeared to install, but horror-of-horrors, the none of the (photo) pictures would show. Installing the 8.02 update didn't help.

Eventually, I did what I always tell people do :rolleyes: to and actually *read* the error message , did some googling and found what turned out to be a fix.

To fix this, grab the file from Microsoft's website here: FIX: You receive an error message when you run a SQL Server Compact 3.5-based application after you install the 32-bit version of SQL Server Compact Edition 3.5 Service Pack 2 on an x64 computer, install the 32 bit file and then the 64 bit file which that installer extracts, and OrchidWiz 8 then works perfectly.