ADO connection to Oracle

I have encountered a serious problem trying to deploy an application in VB.net that accesses an Oracle database.

When I run the application on any system that has the VS.Net development system, everything works fine. Whenever I try to deploy the runtime version, however, the program terminates with no error message.

The program always stops at the connection to the database. The connection is made using generic OLE DB, not the Oracle data provider.

The following method is used to deploy the runtime version:

• Dotnetfx.exe is run to install the .NET framework.
• Oracle Client 9.2 is installed to connect to the database
• Oracle Provider for OLD DB is then installed.

The deployment has been tried with two Win2000 machines, one with a previous version of Oracle Client, the other with no installation of Oracle.

If I construct a UDL file and specify the target database, the connection is tested successfully. On the machine with SQL, a connection can also be made.

The OleDB.OleDBConnection.Open call is made within a Try…Catch structure. The connection string points to the UDL file. As I said, the program terminates with no exception being thrown and no error message.

At this point I don't have a clue. I've looked for some post that mentions this problem but have not found any.

Should I just switch from the generic OleDB library to the Oracle data provider? I'll do this if I have to, but I would like to retain flexibility, as this software might be used for other databases.

Right now I'm completely stopped.

TIA. Frank Maxey
fdmaxey_at_yahoo.com Received on Mon Jul 19 2004 - 08:11:08 CDT