By Tony Baer 

At Microsoft’s TechEd conference in Orlando, Oracle is announcing beta versions of a couple existing tools that help .NET developers work with Oracle databases, plus a new tool for writing applications that store web session data in Oracle databases. 

Oracle is adding a new feature to Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio .NET that allows developers to generate code by dragging and dropping database objects onto ASP.NET web pages. It also adds the ability to back up Oracle scripts that are part of .NET apps into popular source code control tools, including Microsoft Visual SourceSafe, CollabNet Subversion, or Microsoft’s Visual Studio Team System (VSTS) Foundation Server. 

Oracle has also automated support for custom data types in Oracle with a wizard that helps you map data without having to drill down to SQL or write in C# or Visual Basic.NET. 

Oracle’s Data Provider for .NET, which helps developers gain access to data inside Oracle databases, is adding support for mapping custom classes from C# or VB.NET into custom data objects. 

Additionally, Oracle is introducing a new .NET offering, called Oracle Providers for ASP.NET, which lets you store session state in an Oracle database. This feature is useful for tasks such as preserving access (a form of single sign on) to a web application without requiring repeated logins. 

Oracle is supporting eight data provider types that form attributes of a web user’s session access. The most popular are likely to be membership in an authorized user group, individual user role, and profile (which covers the attributes of a user relating to their access privileges). Other providers include session state for shopping carts, web events, personalization, cache dependency, and site maps. 

Each of these tools are being released as free beta versions. Oracle has not decided when they will be ready for general release.

For more info please visit: http://www.semaphore-software.com/technology_offering/software_application_oracle.htm