June 19, 2009 at 13:34Microsoft discontinues Oracle Client development in ADO.NET 4
Translation of an article from the official blog.
As part of our development of a long-term strategy for ADO.NET, we held a series of discussions with our customers, internal and external partners, and MVP to better coordinate our development efforts and make sure that we provide the necessary technologies in accordance with the priority needs of our customers. One of the key intentions of these discussions and related studies was to understand the needs and requirements of customers, to develop applications using Oracle “System.Data.OracleClient” (OracleClient). OracleClient is an ADO.NET provider for Oracle, developed by Microsoft and comes as part of the .NET Framework.
We learned that a significant majority of customers use our partners' Oracle ADO.NET providers, with regularly updated support for Oracle releases, as well as new features. In addition, many third-party vendors are able to continually provide the same level of quality and support that customers expect from Microsoft. This proves that our partners are able to provide good support for our technologies and the strength of our partner ecosystem. Even if we make significant investments in ADO.Net OracleClient to bring it in line with the providers of our partners, our customers do not have good reasons to switch to ADO.Net OracleClient.
Decision
After carefully considering all the options, and talking with our customers, partners and MVP, it was decided to exclude OracleClient from the ADO.NET roadmap.
Recommendations and guidelines:
System.Data.OracleClient will be available in the upcoming 4.0 release. NET Framework, however, it will be marked as deprecated. This will have no implications for existing applications, and these applications will continue to work as expected. The development of new applications that use OracleClient will be supported, however, warnings will be shown if applications are compiled on .Net 4.0. After compilation, no error or warning messages will be displayed during operation. We strongly encourage customers to use our partners' Oracle ADO.NET providers instead of continuing to use Microsoft OracleClient to develop new applications.
Microsoft will continue to provide fixes for critical issues in System.Data.OracleClient according to standard support policies for .Net Framework 4.0. We will also continue to introduce critical bug fixes in future service packs for the .NET Framework 4.0.
As part of our development of a long-term strategy for ADO.NET, we held a series of discussions with our customers, internal and external partners, and MVP to better coordinate our development efforts and make sure that we provide the necessary technologies in accordance with the priority needs of our customers. One of the key intentions of these discussions and related studies was to understand the needs and requirements of customers, to develop applications using Oracle “System.Data.OracleClient” (OracleClient). OracleClient is an ADO.NET provider for Oracle, developed by Microsoft and comes as part of the .NET Framework.
We learned that a significant majority of customers use our partners' Oracle ADO.NET providers, with regularly updated support for Oracle releases, as well as new features. In addition, many third-party vendors are able to continually provide the same level of quality and support that customers expect from Microsoft. This proves that our partners are able to provide good support for our technologies and the strength of our partner ecosystem. Even if we make significant investments in ADO.Net OracleClient to bring it in line with the providers of our partners, our customers do not have good reasons to switch to ADO.Net OracleClient.
Decision
After carefully considering all the options, and talking with our customers, partners and MVP, it was decided to exclude OracleClient from the ADO.NET roadmap.
Recommendations and guidelines:
System.Data.OracleClient will be available in the upcoming 4.0 release. NET Framework, however, it will be marked as deprecated. This will have no implications for existing applications, and these applications will continue to work as expected. The development of new applications that use OracleClient will be supported, however, warnings will be shown if applications are compiled on .Net 4.0. After compilation, no error or warning messages will be displayed during operation. We strongly encourage customers to use our partners' Oracle ADO.NET providers instead of continuing to use Microsoft OracleClient to develop new applications.
Microsoft will continue to provide fixes for critical issues in System.Data.OracleClient according to standard support policies for .Net Framework 4.0. We will also continue to introduce critical bug fixes in future service packs for the .NET Framework 4.0.