Oracle XE connecting as SYSDBA

Question

I am trying to make use Oracle's ability to deploy and invoke .NET assemblies within it. This requires connecting as SYSDBA. The weird thing is that I can connect as Normal and as SYSDBA from within PL/SQL Developer and I can connect as Normal from within Visual Studio, but get an "insufficient privs" error connecting as SYSDBA from Visual Studio.

FYI: I am connecting with user ID/password, not Windows Auth. Below is the tnsnames config entry:

local = (DESCRIPTION = (ADDRESS_LIST = (ADDRESS = (PROTOCOL = TCP)(HOST = localhost)(PORT = 1521)) ) (CONNECT_DATA = (SERVICE_NAME = xe) ) )