MS Outlook --> Power point Presentation in attachment--> quick preview --> Mouse cursor dissappears

Recently, I was facing this nagging issue pretty often.

A brief description of the problem:

When you try to do a quick preview of a Powerpoint presentation that came to you by mail, what happens quite often is that post the presentation, the mouse cursor dissappears.

There are many suggested ways to tide over this problem.

I have discovered a easy way out of it. In case this happens, just click on the ppt once more for another quick preview, and voila the cursor will reappear!!! 

Oracle.DataAccess.dll version mismatch...

In a recent project I was faced with this problem:
I had compiled a local asp.net mvc project pointed to my installed version of the Oracle.ataaccess.dll (from the GAC). Instead of a complete project deployment, I was supposed to just replace the main project dll in the server.

Upon deployment, I found that the version of the Oracle.Dataaccess.dll was not the same and i was getting a "Version Mismatch error", whenever there was a call from the site to the Oracle DB. The Ora Client version in my dev box was 12.1.1.0.
To add to it, the environments of the Dev and the Web server were also different. My local dev box was a 32bit Win 7 whereas the webserver was a 64bit Win Server 2008 R2.

So the first challenge was to know what is the installed version of the Oraclient in Server.
I could not locate the Oracle Client in the usual place on the server, i.e., C://Oraclient/Products/.
1. So I opened the Environment Variables of the server and from the Path Variable found the path to the Oraclient.
From there I got the Oraclient version.
2.  I opened the GAC of the machine to confirm the version
3. I downloaded the exsiting dll of the mvc project and dissembled it (using ILSpy) to see the referenced Oracle version.

I found that the used version on the server was 11.2.3.0
----------------------
Now that I know of the 2 versions, the next challenge was to fix the mismatch of the versions.
The first thing which came to my mind was to uninstall the local version, download and install the one on the server, recompile and the replace the dll.
But that was a cumbersome process, and I couldn't find the exact oraclient version on the net too.
So, I investigated aa little more... From the experience of a previous project, i knew that in the web.config we can instrument the assembly which we want to be loaded.

Then I found this website with the steps: it was not an exact same scenario, but quite close.
(http://tiredblogger.wordpress.com/2008/11/06/getting-oracledataaccess-working-on-x64/)

taking a cue from the website I added the following section to my web.config

<dependentAssembly>
       <assemblyIdentity name="Oracle.DataAccess" publicKeyToken="89b483f429c47342"/>
       <bindingRedirect oldVersion="0.0.0.0-4.121.1.0" newVersion="4.112.3.0"/>
</dependentAssembly>

and voila, after the deployment of the new dll, it was working fine....

ohh and BTW, I got the public key token of the installed oraclient version from the dissembled dll.