visual studio 2013 - Entity Framework 6 (5) connection to Oracle

Question

I am attempting to write a Data Access library for our suite of applications that use Oracle in .net. We currently use NHibernate and are thinking of migrating away as it appears to not be supported all that well.

I am working with Visual Studio 2013 and we have already constructed our Oracle Database. We don't have writes to update it (that is the domain of the db guys). So that will not be part of any calculation on our end.

The client on the server is 32 bit, so we are going to stick with that for now. It is already GAC'd in there, and no need to change it. So we have the 32 bit client on our development boxes.

I have EntityFramework 6.1.0 installed into my project via nuget. I have ODAC 1.112.3.20 installed in my project. The 32bit version of the application. I also have the ODP.net.x86 driver installed (also via nuget).

The problem is that everytime I attempt to create an ADO.net Database connection, the oracle provider is never an option? What am I missing? What do I need to get this to work?

I read an oracle forum one time that said I need to set my Entity Framework to 5.0 and not 6.0. Which is fine, but how do I do that?

Answer 1

EF 6 support is now provided by ODAC 12c Release 3 Beta:

From the .Net Developer newsletter (emphasis mine):

New Download: ODAC 12c Release 3 Beta The new ODAC beta includes Entity Framework 6, Code First, Code First Migrations, .NET Framework 4.5.2 certification, managed ODP.NET XML DB, and managed ODP.NET distributed transaction support without Oracle.ManagedDataAccessDTC.dll.