There is a great article called “EF Database First with ASP.NET MVC” by Tom FitzMacken that is part of Microsoft’s ASP.NET MVC tutorial.
I wanted to create a website using the steps outlined here, except instead of using a SQL Server database (as was presented in the article), I wanted to use an Oracle 12c database. Unfortunately, Oracle was not an option in the list of Data Sources as in the image below:
I had the basic Oracle setup on my development server, however, I found that I did not have Oracle Developer Tools for Visual Studio. I installed the 32-bit version and rebooted the server; I have not tested the 64-bit version for this particular project. Also, I changed the .NET Framework from 4.5 to 4.6. (From what I have read, 4.52 is the minimum that will work with the EF 6 / Oracle setup.) Lastly, I installed several NuGet packages:
- Official Oracle ODP.NET, Managed Driver
- Official Oracle ODP.NET, Managed Entity Framework Driver
- Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP.NET) Managed Driver
- Oracle Rdb Entity Framework Provider
I closed and reopened Visual Studio 2013, and reopened the solution I had created. Now, when adding a Model as in step 2 of the article, I had Oracle options in the Data Source list!
After selecting the Oracle option, you can complete setting up the connection as below. TNS is available as an option; if you use this, the connection string to Oracle must bu set up in your TNSnames file.
After this is done, you can continue with the linked tutorial above!