.NET vs. Oracle Developer

[Orhan Aykut]

Hi,

This may be a newbie question though but we're about to start a large s/w
project (it will be a scalable "accounting and budget program" in a large
scale) and we're planning to develop it in C#, while our customer is leaning
towards Oracle Developer because their IT dept.'s past experience has on it.
They have also mentioned to us in a meeting to benefit from Oracle's Finance
Tools. Would you please give me strong arguments to convince them (and me!)
why we should choose MS .NET (or C# especially) as the development platform
vs. Oracle Developer? This may include (but not limited to) performance,
scalibility, security and usability considerations for both developer and
customer.

At DB side, they will be using Oracle, but I think this won't be a problem
with a good ODBC driver. Does MS give native support to Oracle in their
ADO.NET implementations? I'm looing forward to hearing from you soon.

All your help and contributions are greatly appeciated.

Thanks in advance
Sincerely,

Orhan Aykut
Software Engineer, Belbim AS
(e-mail address removed)

 

[William Ryan eMVP]

Orhan:

Hi,

This may be a newbie question though but we're about to start a large s/w
project (it will be a scalable "accounting and budget program" in a large
scale) and we're planning to develop it in C#, while our customer is leaning
towards Oracle Developer because their IT dept.'s past experience has on it.
They have also mentioned to us in a meeting to benefit from Oracle's Finance
Tools. Would you please give me strong arguments to convince them (and me!)
why we should choose MS .NET (or C# especially) as the development platform
vs. Oracle Developer? This may include (but not limited to) performance,
scalibility, security and usability considerations for both developer and
customer.

Past experience is a big thing and Oracle Developer is a great tool. I
don't know the specific situation but I can think of many reasons why C#
would be a great choice.

1) You can talk to just about any db backend including Comma Delimmeted
files, Excel files, xml etc.
2) You can build your code in such a way that you can use the same classes
to access data from a PDA, a Web page, a web service or a desktop
application. You may have no need for some of those mediums at the moment,
but if you did in the future, the transition is very straightforward.
3) C# is a very cool and powerful NEW language and the IDE allows one to be
very very productive. I haven't used Developer since 2000 so I can't really
speak to it, but one can get very productive wtih C# in a very short amount
of time
4) VB.NET developers, Java Developers, C++ developers and C# developers can
all write in their language of choice and the corresponding assemblies can
integrate seamlessly with each other. Therefore you aren't locked into one
language and you can let developers focus on their strengths.
5) The support for things like Windows Services, MessageQueues and
networking is very very strong
6) The disconnected methodology of ADO.NET is very very powerful. You can
relieve stress on your network and db, and since you can cache data locally,
you could possibly have all of your users start a session, take the Database
down for a few hours for maintenance, then bring it back up, have your users
finish what they were doing, and no one would ever know. YOu can also
easily implement a solution wherein if there is a db failure, the data is
written locally to XML and can be submitted back to the db later on when you
know the DB is available.
7) The way ADO.NET ( and the whole framework for that matter) implements
interfaces, it would be very easy to write your app in such a way that it
could be ported to another db in the future with relative ease or you could
build onto your existing app and provide addiotional support very easily
8) The support for Add-Ins and Plug-Ins in Visual Studio .NET is superb.
This can really allow some time saving advances
9) There are many great 3rd party tools for everything from UI to Data
Access that can really shrink development time

At DB side, they will be using Oracle, but I think this won't be a problem
with a good ODBC driver. Does MS give native support to Oracle in their
ADO.NET implementations? I'm looing forward to hearing from you soon.

All your help and contributions are greatly appeciated.

Thanks in advance
Sincerely,

Orhan Aykut
Software Engineer, Belbim AS
(e-mail address removed)

In the 1.0 Framework you have to go through OleDb but in the 1.1 framework
there is a native library for Oracle, OracleClient. I haven't used it
extensively but my experience with it has been very pleasant

Also, the new 2.0 Framework is going to provide some really amazing features
particularly in ADO.NET. It's a while off so I won't elaborate on it, but
it will truly speed up development and provide for much more responsive and
highspeed apps.

If you have any specific info about the project, I'd be glad to address it
specifically. Like I said, I haven't used Developer for 4 years and
although I really really liked it, C# and .NET are the coolest things I've
worked with.

HTH,

Bill