Yan,

In VS .Net 2002, with respect to Oracle we officially supported database
designing only against version 7.3. Though users were using this
functionality against Oracle8i and Oracle9i, it was never officially
supported.

Due to changes in the database model used for Oracle 8.0 and later, Visual
Studio .NET 2003 (VS2003) no longer allows this functionality as it might
cause corruption of user data. So, if you attempt to implement one of these
functions, you will get one of the following errors:

"This back-end version is not supported to design database diagrams or
tables"

- or -

"This back-end version is not supported to design views"

Now coming to the next issue in your post, the reason you are still seeing
the error message though you re-installed VS .Net 2002 is because the
Visual Data Tools components are shared DLLs (used by VS .Net 2002, VS .Net
2003 and MS Office). They are not uninstalled when you uninstall VS .Net
2003, and though VS .Net 2002 is re-installed, VS .Net 2002 uses the
updated components installed by VS .Net 2003.

So, you can follow these steps to have the oracle functionality you desire
in VS .Net 2002. THIS IS JUST A SUGGESTION, SO DO THIS AT YOUR OWN RISK. BE
AWARE THAT THESE STEPS CAN CAUSE DATA CORRUPTION. YOU SHOULD HAVE COMPLETE
BACKUPS IN PLACE BEFORE PROCEEDING.

a. Uninstall Visual Studio 2003
b. Delete the shared files (\Program Files\Common Files\Microsoft
Shared\Visual Database Tools)
c. Repair/Reinstall Visual Studio 2002


Srinivas Kanakapally
VS .Net Data Tools, MSFT
This posting is provided "AS IS" with no warranties, and confers no rights.

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