Realized that I haven't blogged in a while. I been …uh…working on stuff and traveling a lot lately. Big surprise, right? This week I'll be on vacation. Traveling. Now I understand what the term “busman's holiday“ means.
Last weekend I had dinner with Rob Steward of DataDirect Technologies at his house. The ribs were great (thanks Rob) and while they were cooking I asked him if there would be support of rich schema metadata, base classes, and the neat stuff I wrote about I my ADO.NET 2.0 series of articles in DataDirect's line of ADO.NET data providers. He said that there would be, of course. They want to show up in that neat new Visual Studio 2005 connection dialog (that lists the ADO.NET data providers rather than OLE DB providers) too. And make a good showing in Server Explorer.
Then I asked about whether their classes derived from System.Data.ProviderBase's. This isn't the base classes in System.Data.Common (they support those), but the base classes to assist provider writers. Surprise! Those classes are now protected sealed in .NET 2.0 beta2. Oh. Guess not, then.
But they will support all the same things you'd have gotten from these classes for free: ConnectionStringBuilder, Connection Pooling (they always did support this), etc. So you'll be good to go.
Also, in looking through DbProviderFactory and friends, the SupportedClasses property is removed. That was the one that told you which classes (like Connection, Command, etc) the provider actually implemented. Gone from machine.config entries too. Wonder why…