Hibernate - annotation mappings and misleading SerializationException

Took me a few hours to get to the bottom of this.
I was getting the following Exception, which did not make sense as the deSerialization test passed OK.
I have a domain object that I had proved through a unit test that I could serialize & deserialize successfully.


My domain object contained the following object which if I removed then worked OK:


But tomcat & my integration test were both failing with the following Exception.


It turns out I had missed out an annotation, obvious really but I could not spot the error & the Exception was totally misleading. What had I missed? The '@manyToOne' annotation. Twit.

Eclipse & the error 'Specified VM install not found: type Standard VM, name'

Scenario:

• I had a project that was previously building OK
• At some point I upgraded the version of java
• Came to rebuild the project and the Ant build was failing with the error popup
• Specified VM install not found: type Standard VM, name
• & it was referring to an old JDK that did not exist on my PC & was not referred to by eclipse with the list of installed JREs
• I searched in the project for the JDK listed 'jdk1.6.0_26' 
• No luck - could not find anythine
• I deleted the project & reloaded it from SVN
• Still No luck - I got the same error

After a bit of googling, I found this site http://www.javaworkspace.com/VMNotFound.do

I went for option '2' of edting the launch file in the directory simply renaming the JDK after stopping eclipse.

• C:\projects\WORKSPACE\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.debug.core\.launches

All sorted now thanks.

sqlserver 2012 installation - a few possible gotchas

I have just installed sqlserver 2012 on the same server as one using 2008.
All was good as for accessing through both Management Studios but I struggled to get the web applications to connect to the 2012 databases.

These are all probably standard SQLServer Gotchas but they all got me.

Gotchas:

1. In the config I created a user 'sa' but this was disabled by default. 
1. find the user, right click & go to properties
2. click on 'Status' & select Enabled
2. The database it self did not allow Sql Server authentication.
1. Right click on the database server instance & select Properties
2. click on Security
3. Select the second option 'SQL Server & Windows Authentication'
3. Port Configuration
1. The default port for SQL server is 1433 so I needed to set up a different port for 2012
2. Run up the 'SQL Server Configuration Manager'
3. Inder the tab 'SQL Server Network Configuration' there will be two entries, one for the 2008 service & one for the 2012 service
4. Select tge 2012 service
5. select the TCP/IP protocal name & Right click & select Properties
6. Select the 'IP Addresses' tab
7. On mine the 'TCP Port' field was blank for all entries. I changed everyone to be 1533

Job done I can now connect with my user 'sa' using a standard conmection string but the new port number of 1533