Devart Forums

Since there is no "UserVoice" area for dotConnect feature requests ill post it here.

In essence it would be GREAT with some way to have multiple dotConnect installations side by side on a developer machine. Currently we have a hard time when we need to upgrade to the newest dotConnect for Oracle provider because the releases in the wild have the previous (or an even older) provider. This makes bugfixing incredibly hard since we need remove the new provider install the old, and likewise re-install the new one again to carry on working on new features.

If there was some way to either do X-Copy deployment (for developers) or do multiple installations to GAC and just have the projects refer a specific version this would be great.

I know I could basically just push the "old" versions into the GAC manually but I would prefer not to. Anyway, just an idea that would make our lifes easier.

Development.
We do not recommend to install several versions of dotConnect for Oracle in the development environment because design time will not work correctly in this situation.

Deployment.
You can use several versions of dotConnect for Oracle in your deployment environment. There are two approaches:
1) placing the Devart.* assemblies of the corresponding version in the bin folders of your applications;
2) using "Minimal installation" for several versions of dotConnect for Oracle on the same workstation:
a) delete the HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Devart\Installed Products\dotConnect\Net2\Oracle key for x86 operating system and HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SOFTWARE\Wow6432Node\Devart\Installed Products\dotConnect\Net2\Oracle key for x64 operating system before each new provider installation;
b) be aware that each dotConnect for Oracle installation package places the policy.*.Devart.* files to GAC. If you use several versions of our provider, you should remove these policy files from your GAC.

I am well aware of the development issues and deployment solutions. It was a feature request, and the designtime issues are solveable (for instance Devexpress have solved it), so therefor the feature request.

We will investigate the possibility to create such an installation package that will allow installing several versions of dotConnect for Oracle together, however we can't tell any timeframe at the moment.