Oracle 11.2 with Entity Framework 6 workaround

Question

So in Visual Studio 2013 by default, when you start a new project, in your NuGet packages you have Entity Framework 6.1.1. We are still running Oracle 11.2 (11g), and of course you need at least 12c to be able to connect to EF6.

So I figure why not go back to EF5 and then this will not be an issue. However, when you uninstall 6, there are dependency issues. For example, if you are doing an MVC app, then you get the message "Unable to uninstall 'EntityFramework 6.1.1' because 'Microsoft.AspNet.Identity.EntityFramework 2.1.0' depend(s) on it.". Of course if you uninstall Identity EntityFramework and install EF5, then there is no compatible version of Identity framework, so your projects break.

Is there any way to get around this? We would like to use Entity Framework for our projects, but we know it will be a while until the database is updated from 11.2 to 12c, so we need a work around for now.

Answer 1

you have to install ODAC 12c Release 4 and Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio (12.1.0.2.4) in your machine where you have installed Visual Studio 2013

Then you have to use nuget in order to install the dlls in the project.

as @Alexey Merson says, you don´t need a 12c database in order to connect and work.

Before deploy the application to a server, you will have to install ODAC 12c Release 4 in the server too.

Hope it helps