Oracle Offers Dev Tools for VS.NET - developer objective opinion
I enjoyed to be involved in projects when we had to use Oracle RDBMS. I found that pl/sql is highly enhance and gives developers a rich pl/sql language to solve extremely complex problems in a simple and intuitive way.
What I didn't like and a lot of us used to grumble about it is the tools and environment that are not user/developer friendly and hard to configure especially compared to SQL Server.
Today I saw a promising statement regards Oracle integration tools for VS.NET. We are all familiar and know that VS.NET is one of the great tools out there for developers, architects and in Team System also for QA, Project Managers and so on. Thus, integrating Oracle to this product is a excellent decision. Its slightly remind me the phrase - when u can't beat them - join them, but who care. For me and other developers who use to like Oracle pl/sol this is the right step.
I would like to see Oracle continue their integration with VS.NET and at the same time gives more support for the .NET Framework within their PL/SQL. In particular, gives developers a way to run their .NET assemblies within the DB's and gives a rich support for storing and manipulates XML's through using standard languages like XQUERY as we going to see in Yukon.
Taking great ideas from your competitor products is done by everyone - so expect Oracle will do so by watching the goodies (and there r a lot of these) that will be part of Yukon and that r still not supported in Oracle.