Protect against ODAC Instant Client

Question

I am trying to isolate the oracle client to the application by copying instantclient and setting the environment variable for ORACLE_HOME and PATH to global.asax.cs as described here and here , but when you start on the server you still get [OracleException (0x80004005): The provider is not compatible with the version of Oracle client] . Is there a way to programmatically check the client and provider to give a more descriptive error message?

EDIT This post has a beginning. It lists three causes of the error.

Answer 1

Use the managed oracle client , which is available now, then this question does not matter.

Answer 2

I made a blog post about this. I used it in our DAL to prevent connections to unsupported versions of Oracle.

https://tsells.wordpress.com/2011/05/12/oracle-11g-release-2-and-net-framework-4-0-and-version-checking/