Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio

Once you install Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio 2022, the EDM Wizard is supposed to show Oracle Database as a choice and it will use managed ODP.NET.

Did you restart Visual Studio after the ODT install? Some settings require a VS restart before they get registered.

+ @christian-shay-oracle

Thanks for your comment! Yes, I have restarted Visual Studio after the initial install. I've even restarted the PC.

@christian-shay-oracle Do you have any recommendations on next steps and troubleshooting?

Do you have ODP.net managed as a reference in your project before you attempt to run the Entity Data Model wizard? The version in your references must be version 21 also.

If by ODP.NET managed, you mean Oracle.ManagedDataAccess, then yes. We have the NuGet package installed in the project, version 21.12.0.

Just an update: our team has still not found a solution to this issue. It's very strange that we do see the driver when setting up a connection in Visual Sudio server explorer, but when trying to set up the same connection in this wizard it is not present.

@christian-shay-oracle

Hi Brenton,

The EF wizard actually uses the ODP.NET driver you add as a reference to your project, not the ODP.NET driver used by the Server Explorer. So if there's any issue with the driver added to your project, this will happen.

You've confirmed that you have added ODP.NET version 21 to your project, so I'm not sure what is going on here. Let me check with my team to see if they have other ideas.

I see, ok! I'll note one other thing then just to add further clarity. If we created a brand new .NET Framework Class Library project and install the ODP.NET driver package then the wizard works fine. However, if we used the latest version of this package with Entity Framework and then downgrade these packages to version 21, the wizard breaks and displays the same behavior as above. I'm not sure if this is now somehow related to the app.config entries or something else. I will also note, when adding or updating these packages in the existing project we use (the one referencing Devart dotConnect) the app.config is not updating properly/at all.

Thanks Brenton. I'll be back in touch. I'm going to move this post to the ODT forum also.

If we created a brand new .NET Framework Class Library project and install the ODP.NET driver package then the wizard works fine. However, if we used the latest version of this package with Entity Framework and then downgrade these packages to version 21, the wizard breaks and displays the same behavior as above. I'm not sure if this is now somehow related to the app.config entries or something else.

Hi Brenton,

We are having difficulty understanding what you mean by this. Could you explain in more detail in what scenario the EF Wizard works and what scenario it does not work? Why would you need to “downgrade”?

Sure thing! Although.. there are technically two scenarios currently where it's not working. The first being the original post where we had an existing project that used Devart, and we added the NuGet packages but never see the Oracle drivers in the wizard.

The second non-working scenario: In a new project, when trying to use the latest version of the ODP.NET NuGet package and the Oracle.ManageDataAccess.EntityFramework package, we are unable to actually generate an .edmx, as the wizard crashes when clicking the “next” button after creating the connection in the wizard (when it moves to the table, view, etc. selection screen). Because of this crash, we downgraded the packages to v21.x, and then the ODP driver no longer appeared in the wizard to set up the connection.

That being said, the working scenario for us is creating an entirely new project, simply adding those two packages using v21.x (instead of the latest versions) with EF 6.0 and then the wizard works properly. We will then port over any code we need into this new domain project.

I'm unsure why the wizard does not work with the existing project, or when downgrading versions from 23.x to 21.x in a new project.

Thanks! Can you please explain exactly what you are doing when you “downgrade”?

Can't you uninstall 23 odp.net and install 21 odp.net? Is that what you mean?

Essentially. It's all done using the NuGet package manager in Visual Studio, we just changed the version from the latest 23.x to the latest 21.x version for the package.

What happens if you completely remove (uninstall) ODP.NET 23, save your work, and then install ODP.NET 21 next?