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Data Access has been discontinued. Please refer to this page for more information.

Deploying Telerik® Data Access Assemblies

This article is relevant to entity models that utilize the deprecated Visual Studio integration of Telerik Data Access. The current documentation of the Data Access framework is available here.

Telerik Data Access actually consists of a set of assemblies. These runtime assemblies (required to run a Telerik Data Access based application) reside in the \bin folder of your Telerik Data Access installation. Assemblies that are required by the VisualStudio integration and the design-time of Telerik Data Access are located in the \sdk folder of your installation.

Using XCopy

You are not required to install the Telerik Data Access runtime assemblies in the global assembly cache. You can deploy the runtime assemblies in the directory structure of any application that uses the Telerik Data Access. This simplifies deployment because you can use the xcopy command to install the entire application, including the runtime assemblies, on the target computer. However, if multiple applications on the same computer use Telerik Data Access application blocks, you must install a copy of the assemblies in each application's folder hierarchy. You can deploy the complete content of the Telerik Data Access \bin installation folder together with your application (you will need to put everything in the same directory as your executable). Depending on the backend database used you can remove some of the files that are given below.

Telerik Data Access Assemblies

The Telerik.OpenAccess.Adonet2.dll assembly contains the database-specific classes used for accessing all supported databases (MS SQL Server, Oracle (via ODP .NET), MySQL, Advantage Database Server (ADS), SQL Anywhere, SQL Azure, Microsoft SQL CE and Firebird included).

In the Q2 2011 release the Adonet2 assembly is removed from Telerik Data Access. All the code is now incorporated in the Telerik.OpenAccess.Runtime.dll assembly.

  • Telerik.OpenAccess.dll - this assembly contains the API classes.
  • Telerik.OpenAccess.Config.dll - this assembly contains the classes used to load the Telerik Data Access specific configuration file settings.
  • Telerik.OpenAccess.Runtime.dll - this assembly implements all services available through the API assembly. It contains the database-specific classes used for accessing all supported databases (MS SQL2005 Server, Oracle (via ODP .NET), MySQL, Advantage Database Server (ADS), SQL Anywhere, SQL Azure, Microsoft SQL CE and Firebird included).

  • Telerik.OpenAccess.35.Extensions.dll - this assembly contains the LINQ implementation for Telerik Data Access.

    Telerik.OpenAccess.35.Extensions.dll needs Microsoft .NET Framework 3.5 version or later runtime system installed.

  • Telerik.OpenAccess.40.Extensions.dll

  • Telerik.OpenAccess.Web.dll - contains classes and functions used by Telerik Data Access for Web applications (e.g. OpenAccessDataSource).
  • Telerik.OpenAccess.Windows.dll - contains classes and functions used by Telerik Data Access for Windows applications (e.g. ObjectView and ObjectProvider).
  • MySql.Data.dll - this assembly contains the backend-specific implementation for MySQL. It is shipped with the product but it can be downloaded from here as well.
  • policy.[version major].[version minor].Telerik.OpenAccess.dll - this assembly is the publisher policy file that redirects all binding requests of older versions of Telerik Data Access to the current one. It is the compiled version of the file OpenAccess.20_PublisherPolicy.cfg (also provided).
  • policy.[version major].[version minor].Telerik.OpenAccess.Runtime.dll - this assembly is the publisher policy file that redirects all binding requests of older versions of Telerik.OpenAccess.Runtime to the current one. It is the compiled version of the file Telerik.OpenAccess.Runtime20_PublisherPolicy.cfg (also provided).

It is recommended that you include all of these assemblies—except for the policy assemblies—directly with your application and not use the global assembly cache (GAC).

For more information about the policy and .cfg files, check out the Policy and Cfg Files topic.

Versioning

All the assemblies provided with Telerik Data Access are strong named, which provides versioning and naming protection. This means that the name of the binary code is guaranteed to be unique and that the versions being loaded are the ones intended to be used with the application. Because the application block assemblies are strong named, you can install them in the global assembly cache, where they can be shared by multiple applications on the computer.

Telerik Data Access installation package includes compiled assemblies. Every release of Telerik Data Access has an increased version number for all assemblies except for Telerik.OpenAccess.Config.dll.

It is not recommended to use Telerik Data Access namespaces because it makes it difficult to identify the source of the code. Instead, you should choose a root namespace that meets your own coding and versioning standards.

Assembly Signing

Microsoft .NET Framework 2.0 assemblies can be signed using any mechanism, including signing with both .snk and .pfx files. Also, both the AssemblyKeyFile attribute and the AssemblyKeyName attribute are supported. However, delayed signing is not supported. To sign an assembly with a strong name, you must have a public/private key pair. For more information, see Strong-Named Assemblies and Versioning Tutorial.

See Also