EDIT: The fully managed ODP.NET is now available in production. It is very small (less than 10MB) and is not dependent on other files. You can obtain it here:
http://www.oracle.com/technetwork/topics/dotnet/downloads/index.html
Original answer:
One way to easily ensure that the required Oracle client side software (including ODP.NET) is always available on the deployment machine is to embed it with your application. ODP.NET has gotten a lot easier to embed now that XCOPY ODP.NET is available. You can download it from this link:
http://www.oracle.com/technology/software/tech/windows/odpnet/index.html
With XCOPY ODP.NET, all you need to do when you deploy your application is the following:
1) Copy your application to the target machine
2) Run “install.bat” which copies a couple of Oracle DLL’s to the target machine (including ODP.NET and the Oracle client side (OCI) software)
3) Run “configure.bat”, which does a “gacutil” and updates the registry of the target machine
4) Provide your application with connect string information. You can use the EZCONNECT connect string (“hostname@servicename”) or you (or your customer) can share preexisting sqlnet configurations by setting the TNS_ADMIN registry entry or environment variable to point to another Oracle home that has sqlnet connect aliases already configured.
That’s it! It is really that simple.
I hope you will take a good look at ODP.NET XCOPY in the link above to see for yourself how easy it is these days to embed ODP.NET with your app.
Additional notes:
If you choose not to embed ODP.NET with your application, in both the case of Microsoft OracleClient and in the case of ODP.NET, there needs to be additional Oracle client side (OCI) software installed on any deployment machine. The only difference between the two cases is that when you are using ODP.NET, it also needs to exist on the deployment machine. The good news is that a typical Oracle install on your customer machine will include ODP.NET already.
Now, if your target machine already has ODP.NET installed you don’t need to do anything else. You just need to distribute your application. If you do need to install ODP.NET using the standard installer, you can also download it from the link provided above. The standard ODP.NET install only takes a few minutes and configures everything for you.
And again, you can use EZConnect connect strings to make networking configuration a piece of cake, or use the TNS_ADMIN registry entry or environment variable to take advantage of pre-existing connect aliases that your customer is already used to using.
Hope this helps,
Christian Shay
Oracle
Feel free to provide your feedback on this and other future features at our feature request website:
http://apex.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=18357:46