Oracle Developer Tools - Errors at start up

Issue 1: ODT does not come up inside Visual Studio.

You get the following error:

Package ‘Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET’ has failed
to load properly ( GUID = {D601BB95-E404-4A8E-9F24-5C1A462426CE} ).
Please contact package vendor for assistance. Application restart is
recommended, due to possible environment corruption. Would you like to
disable loading this package in the future? You may use
‘devenv /resetskippkgs’ to re-enable package loading.

The issue stems from a mismatch in DLLs. The easy way to fix this issue is to open a VS.Net Command Prompt. Then CD into the following folder (First close Visual Studio)

C:\oracle\product\10.2.0\client_1\odp.net\bin\2.x

And run the following command which will register the .NET dll into the Global Assembly Cache.

gacutil /i Oracle.DataAccess.dll

You should get the following message - "Assembly successfully added to the cache"

After that restart Visual Studio and click on

If you get the "Add Connection" dialog then you are golden!

Issue 2: You are unable to debug stored procedures.

When you attempt to debug stored procedures (which was the main reason I wanted to try out ODT) you get an error message about insufficient priviledges:

An error occurred while executing the procedure/function:

ORA-01031: insufficient privileges
ORA-06512: at "SYS.DBMS_DEBUG_JDWP", line 68
ORA-06512: at line 1

To solve the problem, do the following:

1. Grant the "debug connect privilege" (for 10g databases) to the connected user.
2. Grant the "debug" and "execute" privilege on the PL/SQL program to the connected user, or
3. Grant the "debug any procedure" privilege to the connected user.

Check this page for more information about fixing other problems you might run into:

http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/dotnet/odt10202rn.html

Update (08.21.2008) - The product manager for Oracle Dev tools for .NET has this very good post about getting PL/SQL debugging running in Visual Studio (link)