Wednesday, August 1, 2012

RedGate activation blues

So, my company makes use of the RedGate SQL Compare SDK tools. And let me just say, if you haven't bought these yet...totally worth doing. If you've ever wished for SQL functionality related to diff, merge, etc on your schema structures or your data itself, RedGate can do it. Period. I drink their kool-aid.

But this week, I hit a snag as I upgraded to a new developer laptop. It came time to re-activate my RedGate DLLs so that I could use them in development projects in Visual Studio. Typically, you simply compile the project, and a little dialog box asking you to activate your trial install of RedGate pops up while Visual Studio builds. Our projects wouldn't popup the dialog box. Instead, we received a build error in the Error List window:

Error      2             Exception occurred creating type 'RedGate.SQLDataCompare.Engine.ComparisonSession, RedGate.SQLDataCompare.Engine, Version=10.0.1.69, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=7f465a1c156d4d57' System.IO.FileNotFoundException: Could not load file or assembly 'file:///C:\Src\...\Bin\RedGate.Licensing.Client.UI.resources.dll' or one of its dependencies. The system cannot find the file specified.               C:\Src\...\licenses.licx     2


("Real" paths omitted to protect what I work on)


So, I searched for this satellite assembly on my entire hard drive. It was nowhere to be found! Now what do I do?


I had never used RedGate support before, so I decided to give it a try. I e-mailed licensing@red-gate.com, and explained my predicament. Within 24 hours, I received a response from their internal support team.


"Thanks for contacting Red Gate. The issue you've run into is that the Windows Form that asks for a serial number was written against .NET v2 and therefore needs to be invoked using a .NET v2 resource reader. There is no satellite DLL that is missing.
To make a long story short, create a new VS project and ensure the target Framework version is 2. Then add in a sample application and build it. The serial number dialog should pop up and ask for your serial number. Once you have activated successfully, you can then go back and compile your .NET 4 projects, since the licence has been created and there is no more need to ask for the serial number again."


Sure enough, my code was based on .NET 4 and therefore was not allowing RedGate's licensing mechanism to work properly. As suggested, I used a .NET v2 project to activate the copy. Another coworker pointed out that their installer places some samples at this path:


C:\Program Files (x86)\Red Gate\SQL Comparison SDK 10\Samples\Automating SQL Compare


So, I opened one of those, built, was prompted for my license, activated, and the sample built successfully.  I then opened my original project (.NET v4), and compiled it successfully! Yes!


So, I was unable to find much online about this issue. I wanted to blog so that others might experience less pain. This is for RedGate v 10.x, and possibly other versions.

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