It’s been a while since I’ve posted here. Part of the reason for this is I’ve been in hiding for the last 10 days learning the ins and outs of ASP.NET 2.0. Moreover, I’ve been trying to make it all work with Oracle, and when I say “make it work with” I mean get all those fancy new data bound controls to bind to Oracle data, and to do so by calling stored procedures in packages.
The good news is I made it work. The bad news is it’s much harder than it should be. Microsoft’s Oracle provider doesn’t readily acknowledge stored procedures in packages, and Visual Studio 2005 doesn’t readily acknowledge Oracle’s own data provider for .NET.
In a few days, I’ll try and list all the issues, and explain how ASP.NET 2.0’s ObjectDataSource control lets you work around them and still take advantage of data binding. I’m also going to try and get people at both companies to look this over and maybe rectify things before Whidbey ships. Since there’s every indication that said ship date is still nine months away, this shouldn’t be too tough, but, even so, never underestimate the potential for competitors to fall short of effortless interoperability.