Catastrophic Failure

Here’s a nice error message for a Friday afternoon:

Ouch, catastrophic failure!  Hang on, “catastrophic’”, really??  My computer didn’t explode, I’m still alive, I can even click the OK button to make the catastrophe go away.  Okay, what I was trying to achieve wasn’t possible for some reason, but to call it catastrophic is a little exaggerated.

But I guess it beats the useless “an unexpected error has occurred” message any time.  Because, an error, isn’t that by definition unexpected?  Unless you have an application with a button called Generate Error!

I had the pleasure of encountering this message while attempting to add a new Analysis Services connection to my SSIS project.  For some reason, probably a DLL that didn’t load as usual, not all controls were available and when I specified the server name, I got that message after clicking the OK button.

Here’s another variation, received through another button on that same screen:

So now it’s catastrophic and unexpected, sounds more like it! We even got the error number: 0x8000FFFF, well of course!

Most important: I was able to “fix” this issue by restarting my BIDS (2008).

Have fun!

Valentino.