Fixing a broken tablet touch-screen

This post has been two months in the making, but it's finally ready to publish. Yesterday I finally completed the replacement of my daughters cracked touch-screen.

Buying a tablet from China makes them affordable, but few people in the UK are willing or able to fix them (other than Hardware Heroes, apparently), so hence I took on the challenge. Here's my steps:

1. Disassemble the tablet to reach the touch screen. The photo sequence on G+ shows the steps. You need to take care to keep earthing yourself, and not damage any of the components with the screwdriver, knife or soldering iron.
2. Once I'd successfully removed the broken screen, I ordered a new one from the tablet supplier (Ployer, in China). They agreed to ship it for £20.
3. Reassemble the tablet following by reversing the steps.
4. Power on and pray. The result was one very happy daughter.

SQL errors don't cause exceptions if nocount is off

We had a strange problem today: an end-user was getting unexpected results (no data), but no exceptions were occurring.

The cause was traced to incorrect database permissions, i.e.

Server: Msg 229, Level 14, State 5, Procedure xyz, Line 123
SELECT permission denied on object 'abc', database 'pqr', owner 'dbo'.

The question was, why did this not cause an exception? A possible cause is our use of SqlDataReader, but I was unhappy with the suggested fix. The underlying cause however was that nocount was set to off (its default setting). This caused the row count messages to mask the error, and thus no exception was raised.

Lesson learned: always set nocount on at the start and off at the end of each stored procedure, e.g.

create procedure xyz
as
begin

set nocount on

-- SP SQL

set nocount off

end

go

MDAC 2.7 broken by another installer

Encountered this knarly problem recently and its solution took some arriving at, so worth publishing.

A system with MDAC 2.7 received the install of an application that uses MDAC 2.1. In theory both versions of MDAC can live happily side-by-side, but for some reason the install replaced sqloledb.dll with an incompatible version.

Re-installing MDAC 2.7 didn't detect the change, so didn't fix this issue. The only resolution was to install MDAC 2.8.