Christian Shay - Oracle and .NET

A major beta release is available now for ODP.NET as well as Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET. This 11g beta release also marks the first release of a new product, Oracle Providers for ASP.NET. I've written a new white paper (with lots of screen shots) that illustrates the new Visual Studio enhancements. Keep an eye on this blog in the weeks ahead as I will be writing articles explaining how to take advantage of some of the new features such as ASP.NET code generation and User-Defined Type (UDT) support...

We also have some new Oracle by Example walkthroughs that can help get you started:
Oracle by Example: Building ASP.NET Web Applications with ODT
Oracle by Example: Building .NET Applications Using ODT

Here's a summary of the new features:

Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET New Features:

Visual Studio 2005 integration with Server Explorer, Data Sources Window, Dataset Designer, TableAdapter Configuration Wizard and more

Improved ASP.NET web developer support

Oracle Database script project to provide source control of Oracle scripts

SQL script editor

Built in support for executing SQL*Plus scripts

Explain plan support

Integration with Query Designer

New designer for granting/revoking privileges on schema objects

User-Defined Types: Create, explore, modify UDTs; custom class code generation for .NET applications

Data Window and Query Window enhancements

Oracle Data Provider for .NET:

Instant Client Support: Smaller ODP.NET client installation

User-Defined Types: Map Oracle objects and collections to .NET custom types and support REFs to object types

Process Database Down Events: ODP.NET automatically frees connections of a downed Data Guard instance

Windows-Authenticated User Connection Pooling: Windows-authenticated connections can now be pooled.

Connection Pool Performance Counters: Monitor connection pool status

Oracle Providers for ASP.NET:

Membership Provider: Stores and retrieves registered user information in the Oracle database

Role Provider: Stores and retrieves user role information in the Oracle database

Site Map Provider: Stores and retrieves site map information in the Oracle database

Session State Provider: Stores and retrieves session state information in the Oracle database

Profile Provider: Stores and retrieves user profile information in the Oracle database

Web Events Provider: Stores and retrieves ASP.NET health monitoring event information in the Oracle database

Web Parts Personalization Provider: Stores and retrieves personalization data in the Oracle database

Cache Dependency Provider: Automatically invalidates ASP.NET cached data based on changes made to the base data in the Oracle database