LinqConnect and Oracle, licensing question

soren · Post by **soren** » Thu 24 Nov 2011 10:02

Hi

We are in the process of supporting our product on Oracle and have used your LinqConnect product to help us along (currently in trial).

We are getting closer to a final decision and have a few questions that we have a hard time finding answers for:

1) We seem to need to buy LinqConnect Professional to get Oracle support, but it says that this package comes bundled with Express versions of dotConnect for Oracle. We need to be able to deploy our product at customer sites and we are under the impression that the Express versions does not support the license component system that you are using (more on that below). Is this correct and if so, do we need to purchase both LinqConnect Professional AND a dotConnect for Oracle product to get a working solution?

2) We have a hard time getting your licensing working for our product (I bet you have heard that before). I have installed LinqConnect on my machine and I am able to get things up and running (compilation, unittests + integration tests against the database). My coworker (who does not have LinqConnect installed yet), however, get the "license not found" error message when starting the product even though I seem to have tried a number of variations of advise you given on your Licensing page when building the product (embedding the licenses.licx, manually generating a resource file etc.). In your documentation you refer to a License Wizard that seems to be designed to help troubleshoot these issues but I cannot seem to find it anywhere. What am I missing? Or doesn't these things work in trial mode?

3) As executable we have our own service application, but we would also like to run our integration tests (using resharper in VisualStudio and TeamCity on our build servers) so do we need to add a entries in the licenses.config file for these (external) executables somehow? Or do you recommend installing everything on the build servers?

I think you have a great product here that really helps us support Oracle as an alternative database and I hope you can help me with the issues above

StanislavK · Post by **StanislavK** » Fri 25 Nov 2011 16:00

Concerning your questions:

1) The Express version of our providers are free, thus there is no need of adding the technical license resource to applications that use them. In particular, you don't need to purchase a data provider to use LinqConnect in your applications.

2) The license resource is needed for licensed versions of our data providers only; i.e., you should be able to run applications that use LinqConnect without adding the technical license resource. Therefore, there is no need in the License wizard for LinqConnect either.

As for the problems you encounter when deploying your applications that use LinqConnect, could you please specify the number of the version you are using, and the exact error message you are getting. If possible, please send us a small test project with which the issue can be reproduced.

soren · Post by **soren** » Wed 30 Nov 2011 12:42

Hi Stanislav

Thanks for getting back to me on my last questions. After I spend some more time adding license.licx files to my projects I seem to have overcome the initial problem with not being able to find the license. However I ended up with another error on our TeamCity build server (which does not have any version of LinqConnect installed, all DevArt assemblies are referenced from a /lib folder that is retreived from SVN)

Our projects build successfully (as far as we can tell) but when running the automated integration tests the utilize LinqConnect for Oracle, we receive the following error: License not valid due to the problems with LinqConnect installation

As mentioned, there is no official LinqConnect installation on the build server, so that might be the explanation but I'd like to hear your expertise on this problem.

Along these lines I am also wondering if we need to install the purchased LinqConnect package on our build server or if we can somehow avoid that and still be able to build our assemblies and run the tests. We like to keep our build server as clean as possible so I hope there is a way to let the build server actually build our product without having a LinqConnect installation...

StanislavK · Post by **StanislavK** » Thu 01 Dec 2011 15:37

Could you please specify the content of the license.licx file you are using, and the version of LinqConnect you are using? The problem may be caused by the license resource for the dotConnect for Oracle provider being incorrect. For some general tips on such problems, please refer to
http://www.devart.com/dotconnect/oracle ... oubleshoot

As for building/deploying applications that use LinqConnect, you should be able to do this without installing LinqConnect on the build server or deployment machine.

soren · Post by **soren** » Fri 02 Dec 2011 14:01

Hi Stanislav

Again, thanks for getting back to be. I'll try to follow the guidelines you pointed me towards, I actually did update halfway through the process (you had a temporary problem with handling invalid connectionstrings, so I upgraded a few days later) so that might be a clue. I'll try to clean up the build server for old assemblies and run again.

Meanwhile, here is the info you requested:
Content of the license.licx file:
Devart.Data.Oracle.Linq.Provider.OracleDataProvider, Devart.Data.Oracle.Linq

Versions:
LinqConnect.exe (installer) 3.0.16
Devart.Data.dll 5.0.349.0
Devart.Data.Linq.dll 3.0.16
Devart.Data.Oracle 6.50.250
Devart.Data.Oracle.Linq 3.0.16

Hope I am able to sort things out by my self but I'll be happy to hear any advise (however trivial) you might have...

StanislavK · Post by **StanislavK** » Mon 05 Dec 2011 16:12

It should not be necessary to refer to the Devart.Data.Oracle.Linq.OracleProvider class in the licenses.licx file. Actually, you should be able to use no license resource at all if you use the assemblies from the LinqConnect installation package (as LinqConnect itself needs no license resources, and data providers shipped with it are of the free Express edition).

However, if you do include the entry for OracleProvider into the licenses.licx file, the problem may occur, e.g., if some assemblies from prior LinqConnect versions persist on your build server.

To resolve the problem, please try performing the following:
- make sure no assemblies from older versions of LinqConnect are available in the GAC or the Program Files\Devart and Program Files\Common Files\Devart folders;
- cancel embedding licenses.licx as a resource into your application, and try recompiling it.
Please tell us if this helps.