More details to come (including code), but here's a first glimpse of what worked and what didn't when I combined Whidbey with Oracle:
· Even though ODP.NET was installed on the same machine as VS 2005, none of the VS dialogs or wizards recognized it.
· Using Microsoft’s Oracle provider in the Server Explorer window, I could enumerate, but not view the PL/SQL code for, stored procedures within Oracle packages.
· Using Microsoft’s Oracle provider in the TableAdapter Configuration Wizard, stored procedures in packages were not enumerated and could not be selected. Therefore, typed DataSets against Oracle package-based stored procs were no go.
· I couldn’t use the ASP.NET SqlDataSource control with ODP.NET. The latter isn’t available from any drop-downs, and manually typing “Oracle.DataAccess.Client” into the Provider property created errors when I tried to run the page.
· The winning combination was the ObjectDataSource control combined with “hand-written” classes that use ODP.NET to implement CRUD operations on package-based stored procedures.
· Most of my research was in ASP.NET 2.0, and not Windows Forms. But similar results came up there as well.