So, I'm at Oracle OpenWorld in San Francisco this week to learn more about how we can leaverage our Oracle backend through .NET.  As some of you might now, MS provides a "built-in" Oracle ADO.NET provider within the .NET Framework.  If you didn't know, Oracle also provides their own managed ADO.NET provider that communicates natively with your Oracle db resources.  They also provide something called Oracle Tools for VS.NET (OTDN), that is a series of add-ins for VS2005|2003 that allow you to connect, modify, debug and query your Oracle database.  The ADO.NET provider and OTDN are free for download.

So, here I am...getting training on these tools, trying to learn PL/SQL and trying to understand Oracle product marketing.  Also, I hope to do some little sight-seeing around the bay area.  I walked around part of the city today during lunch and I was pretty impressed with all the hussle and bussle there is during lunch time.  I finally settled for getting a bite to eat at Union Square.  For my lunch entertainment, I watched a herd of Japanese tourists take TONS of pictures of the buildings around them. 

I'm staying at the Marriott San Francisco, not only do I have an awesome view of the city, but I'm centrally located.  Unfortunalety, all of the .NET sessions are being held at the Hilton, so I have a pretty easy 5 minute walk or a 20 minute shuttle ride.  I plan on walking to-and-from the hotel so I can see more of the city from the ground.  Hopefully, I can get out to see the Golden Gate Bridge and Alcatraz.  If I do that, them I've accomplished everything I set to do.

Anybody of my three readers out there using Oracle as their backend system?  If so, how do you like it?  Does it play nicely with .NET?  If not, how can you work around it?  I did find out today from Christian Shay, that the OTDN has a bug that messes up shared memory causing the IDE to hang when debugging applications.  They're currently trying to figure out the cause so they can start working on a fix.  So there you have it, a little heads up.  I plan on sending him a dump of my application debug session because I'm running into the same issue on my work laptop.  The more info they have, the better thy can track it.

<OracleBlooper>

Ok, so I was trying to log into the conference portal so I can get some of the slides and print out my schedule.  Unfortunately, their servers/system didn't like me (or anybody else) doing that.  That's right, their application servers were overwhelmed with traffic, that they couldn't respond to all the requests.  Every other time you clicked on a link, you got the "Web Application Server Is Currently Unavailable" red text.  To me, this looks bad...and it's kinda funny too!

If you're planning on showing your applications as the "best", this should not happen.

</OracleBlooper>

And yes, I WILL BE at the Heartland's Developer Conference on Thursday.  I'm heading back on Wednesday and should be into Omaha around 11 PM (yeah, it sucks.)