Oracle: .NET Stored Procedures, etc

.NET Stored Procedures for Oracle10gR2, etc.

Here's a presentation from OracleWorld by Christian Shay of Oracle, on how .NET devs can exploit new .NET features in Oracle 10gR2. Really cool. One of the capabilities allows you can write Oracle stored procedures in VB.NET or C#, right from within Visual Studio.NET. (They call this the "Oracle Database Extensions for .NET").

I found it on Oracle's .NET developer center site, which is also quite nice.

You need the "latest" Oracle on Windows in order to run .NET stored procedures in the Oracle DB. If you're a .NET developer, but don't have 10gR2, but you have a prior version of Oracle, there are still some cool toys for you. The Oracle Developer Tools for .NET work with 10g (r1 or r2) 9i, or 8i. Yee-haw. You can even write PL/SQL from within VS.NET. And, YES, your Oracle DB can be running on any platform. Doesn't have to be Windows. (VS has gotta run on Windows, of course.) Here's Oracle's feature overview.

There's also a MSDN webcast on these tools. Given by Christian, and another Oracle PM! Cho! right from the source. That thing is about an hour. If you don't want to invest an hour, check out the 15-minute overview.

The Oracle Developer Tools for .NET are a free download from Oracle. You have to have a licensed copy of Oracle and VS in order to use 'em, but if you've got that stuff, go download this freebie and get started.

I'd love to hear feedback on who is using any of this, who has tried it and what results you got.

ps: Oracle created all these extensions to Visual Studio using the VSIP SDK (for VS2005 this is renamed the Visual Studio SDK). Yes, Virginia, Visual Studio is extensible. Anyone can download and use this SDK, to do similar work, extending Visual Studio for their own purposes.