Using Oracle in a standalone .NET application

Our goal is to set up standalone .NET application without dependency on installed Oracle client in our system. In other words, our application should contain all necessary dll's in the bin folder of our project .

We need following dll's from Oracle client :

• oci.dll
• OraOps11w.dll
• oraocci11.dll
• orannzsbb11.dll
• oraociei11.dll
• Oracle.DataAccess.dll

You can get them from installed version of your Oracle client. In my case it was 11.2 version of Oracle client.
You can put this assemblies in some folder in your solution, let's say this folder is named "Components".

Now you can refer Oracle.DataAccess in your solution projects whenever you need. So, Oracle.DataAccess will get to the bin folder of your project when you'll build it.

But we need other Oracle libs to be in the bin folder too! How to force this to happen?

You can achieve this using Pre-Build Events of your project. Go to Properties of your project, then select the Build Events tab and paste the following lines in Pre-build event box:

copy $(ProjectDir)\..\..\Components\oci.dll $(TargetDir)
copy $(ProjectDir)\..\..\Components\OraOps11w.dll $(TargetDir)
copy $(ProjectDir)\..\..\Components\oraocci11.dll $(TargetDir)
copy $(ProjectDir)\..\..\Components\orannzsbb11.dll $(TargetDir)
copy $(ProjectDir)\..\..\Components\oraociei11.dll $(TargetDir)

Maybe, you'll need to correct paths for your case, but you should get the idea: these Oracle libraries will be copied into the bin folder of your project before the each build.
So, after each build you will get standalone application(with all necessary Oracle client libs), that can run on any computer without the need to install Oracle on this computer.