Connection options for VS and .NET
Interop bonanza. For those keeping score at home,
- IBM has DB2 add-ins for VS, along with a DB2 managed ADO.NET provider.
- IBM also has Tivoli AccessManager for .NET
- and MQ Classes for .NET
- Oracle will soon shipp Oracle tool add-ins for Visual Studio to complement the ODP.NET ADO.NET data provider.(the tools are in beta2 now)
- Sybase: in the Visual Studio Industry Program, not sure of their ship plans.
- SAP provides the .NET Connector, and the Portal Development Kit for VS.
- OTP Systems produces a Tuxedo connector for .NET. No VS tool add-ins.
- Lots of 3rd party VS add-ins for connecting to Mainframes
- BizTalk Server has adapters for nearly everything.
- WS-I has stipulated rules for web services interop
- WSDL-First is being adopted as the right approach for interoperable web services. Tools are emerging.
Those things, as well as the COM interop and P/Invoke capabilities in .NET, get you from .NET to pretty much wherever you need to go. But we always want more, don't we? ;)
What I would like to see:
- from IBM: dev tool add-ins for MQSeries, similar to what they provided for DB2
- also from IBM: Visual Studio add-in for Lotus Notes
What's on your list?