Windows Application Deployment & Client Software
703094May 26 2009 — edited May 26 2009+(I think I finally found the most appropriate forum for my concerns.)+
Traditionally my company has been building windows applications in "Windows Forms" using C# on .Net 2.0. These applications have most often used Oracle 10g as a data store and the built-in System.Data.OracleClient provider library for their DAL, then been distributed via an application server such as TerminalServer/Citrix.
Being a pain-in-the-butt progressive employee, I am trying to step out of this paradigm by building a WPF .Net 3.5 application that uses ODP.Net to talk to a 10g database... and most importantly, avoid TerminalServer/Citrix deployment to make the best of WPF features.
I have built a baby application (MVVM style) and a very simple database on our dev box; I have installed ODP.Net and embedded the Oracle.DataAccess.Client and Types libraries in my application. On my machine I have a full blown Oracle 11g Client installation with an Oracle Home. In that Oracle Home is my tnsnames.ora file that maps the arbitrary address name to the specific server host and port, and my application's connection string uses that address name. If I am understanding properly, the ODP.Net client library is not enough, and that it looks at run-time for an Oracle Home to resolve the address name to a host/port via tnsnames.ora, and then use the actual client software to work with my database.
My issue then is that I need to distribute the application to my users without a full-blown Oracle Client on their machines, while still refraining from strongly-typing the host name and port in the compiled application. In their TerminalServer/Citrix model, this is cake - a client is done once on the host box, uses tnsnames just like on my box, and is easily managed in once place. WPF however is pretty stunted by terminal server deployment (until Windows 2008 server where rendering is pushed all the way through to the user's machine), so I here is where I am stuck:
Is there a way to embed/distribute necessary client software with the WPF w/ ODP.Net application so that the users can enjoy the simplicity of ClickOnce deployment, have only a single application to maintain, and maintain the inherent performance that comes with ODP rather than Microsoft's weak-ass client library?
Thanks ahead of time to any who take a moment to help me out. I appreciate it.
-III