As mentioned in a lot of sources, Visual Studio 2008 SP1, in spite of its name, also contains service packs for the .NET core components. Namely:
- .NET 2.0 SP2
- .NET 3.0 SP2
- .NET 3.5 SP1
Unfortunately there is not too much information available what these components contain, but it seems that they may seriously affect applications that were running perfectly before.
It seems for example that .NET 2.0 SP2 contains a change in the System.Data.OracleClient assembly that may break applications using an Oracle database.
The most visible result of the issue is that LOB handling fails with the exception:
Modifying a LOB requires that the connection be transacted.
Although this issue causes breaks in applications, there are even more dangerous effects of the bug. The transactions may automatically switch “Auto-commit” mode that can produce inconsistent and corrupt data in the database even without any visible error. More details here.
In December, Microsoft released an update to the .NET Framework service packs: KB959209
Funnily, Microsoft has not stopped confusing developers with the updates. Although the title of the update is “Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 Family Update”, it contains updates for .NET 2.0 SP2, .NET 3.0 SP2 and .NET 3.5 SP1. You can install these updates individually. (To resolve the Oracle issue, it is enough to install the fix for .NET 2.0 SP2.)
Update: It seems that the update can be installed only to English .NET frameworks. Other language versions (e.g. German) can be also found at Microsoft Download Center (although it is not so easy). Here are the most common download links for German .NET frameworks: