Firebird database AND Visual studio 2008 LINQ

Today, I managed to make a connection from Visual Studio 2008 to our Firebird production database servers. Firebird is an open source database. At my job we have fine experiences with the database platform. It's stable and it's free.

In order to access Firebird databases from Visual Studio 2008, I first downloaded the DDEX provider 2.0.2 for Visual Studio 2005. They don't offer a DDEX provider yet for Visual Studio 2008. However, the 2005 version seems to work fine at the moment under Visual Studio 2008.

On the following site you can download the DDEX provider:

http://www.firebirdsql.org/dotnetfirebird/download/index.html

Here's a direct link to the DDEX provider: DDEX Provider 2.0.2 for Visual Studio 2005.

Further, I also downloaded and installed the ADO.Net dataprovider: FirebirdClient 2.0.1 for .NET Framework 2.0.

I both installed the DDEX provider and the ADO.Net dataprovider in my C:\Program Files directory.

Next I installed the dll's from the DDEX and ADO.Net downloads in the Global Assembly Cache with gacutil under the command prompt of Visual Studio. Not all downloaded dll's can be installed in the GAC, however.

Next I configured the correct machine.config file (which is located somewhere under your C:\Windows directory) on my computer, like explained in the readme.txt from the DDEX download. It's important to check and possibly alter twice the versionnumber and public key token of the assembly FirebirdSql.Data.FirebirdClient. You can find this information in the GAC (under the C:\Windows\Assembly directory for the assembly).

Finally, I registered the following registry settings in my registry. Save it first to your harddisk and open it with Notepad (after renaming it to firebird.txt). It's important to note that the path to the following dll in this file is correct:

C:\\Program Files\\FirebirdClient\\FirebirdSql.VisualStudio.DataTools.dll

In case you installed the dll in above directory, it should work right away. Otherwise you have to adjust this directory. Please note that you have to use two backslashes between directory and subdirectory! By the way, you don't need to worry about versionnumbers or public key tokens in this registry file. Rename firebird.txt back to firebird.reg, and then double click the file in order to import the settings into the registry. It's important to note that these registry settings will not work with Visual Studio 2005 or Visual Studio 2003.

When you start Visual Studio 2008, you should now be able to make a connection to a Firebird database, via the data connections in the server explorer.

Because I know already about Linq in Visual Studio, I wanted to try it with tables in a Firebird database, however I quickly found out that this is not possible at the moment. It seems that you can only work with Linq with SQL sever or SQL express databases, unfortunately. However, I'm very happy to have access to my Firebird databases in Visual Studio 2008.