AdventureWorks2008R2 HumanResources.Employee table cannot be added to designer surface in Visual Studio 2010 SP1

Question

Problem

AdventureWorks2008R2 HumanResources.Employee table cannot be added to designer surface in Visual Studio 2010 SP1. Nor can I add the Production.Document table.

My environment

I am using Visual Studio 2010 Ultimate, with Visual Studio 2010 SP1 from March 2011 installed, running on Windows 7. I am talking to a SQL2008 R2 server (version 10.50.1617), installed on Windows Server 2008 R2. All of these are running in VMs on Hyper-V.

Details

I did a simple experiment. I installed the AdventureWorks2008R2 database, created a console application, and intended to start coding.

First, I created a Link-to-sql item for the database AdventureWorks2008R2 . I tried to add the HumanResources.Employee table to the designer surface by using the standard technique of dragging from server explorer. But it complained that "One or more selected items contain a data type that is not supported by the designer". My searches on the net did not reveal anything helpful.

It is happy when I drag the HumanResources.Department table to the designer surface. But it will not process the Employee table. Nor can it handle the Production.Document table.  What is wrong here?

I tried other approaches:

Then, I created an Entity Framework Model. I used the Generate from Database option and tried to add HumanResources.Employee to the model. It complains that "Unable to generate the model because of the following exception: 'The table 'AdventureWorks2008R2.Production.Document' is referenced by a relationship, but cannot be found."

Then I examine and discover that Employee has a relationship to Production.Document. It uses FileStream stuff in case that matters.

I even tried retargeting the console application to use the June 2011 Entity Framework CTP in case they had made improvmeents. Same results.

Are these well-known limitations of some of the new SQL 2008 R2 features? If not, what am I doing wrong? If so, what technology should I be using to access SQL 2008 R2 features? And where are these limitations spelled out?

thanks

I alos posted this in the Linq to sql forum but it occurred to me that this community would have more experience with this database.

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Best Regards, David K Allen http://codecontracts.info Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA

Answer 1

Is this still an issue?

Thanks!

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Ed Price (a.k.a User Ed), SQL Server Customer Program Manager (Blog, Twitter, Wiki)

Answer 2

I imagine it would be with the original product versions. But I have moved on since I posted that 18 months ago. 

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Best Regards, David K Allen http://codecontracts.info Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA