Unexpected Error Adding new Data Connection in Visual Studio

Recently I was adding a Data Connection in Visual Studio, and I found that I kept getting an error message box whenever I tried.

There were a number of suggestions such as:

devenv.exe /reset

and doing a repair install which didn’t work.

The last thing that I tried was a registry tweak, now – the first thing that I noticed was that the tweak folder was missing in my environment ( Win7/64 bit ) and I have experienced certain issues before with registry folders which have been attributed to registry virtualization or something to that effect.

What I discovered was that I needed to look in the Wow64 tree for the folder.

( 32 bit )

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>\DataProviders

( 64 bit )

HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\Software\Wow6432Node\Microsoft\VisualStudio\<version>\DataProviders\

where <version> is 9 for VS 2008, 10 for VS 2010.

I also found that the error included the guid for the data provider I needed to remove in my case.

Further Reading: here