Oracle support becomes deprecated in ADO.NET 4.0

In the fortcoming .NET version 4.0, Microsoft has decided to deprecate the ADO.NET classes to access Oracle databases. Shortly put, this means that you can continue to use the System.Data.OracleClient namespace and the classes there, but in a future .NET version (5.0?) they will become obsolete and not available.

What Microsoft now recommends is that developers wanting to access Oracle databases would switch to third-party libraries. Of course, this will mean that you need to rewrite parts of your code; this is just a good refresher to us all: don't rely that certain libraries are there forever. Instead, make sure you isolate your database access to certain classes and/or write appropriate wrappers around them, so you don't need to rewrite your whole application.

Although this a quite unfortunate decision, I'm not sure it was an easy one for Microsoft. More details can be found from the ADO.NET team blog.