Thanks for the reply. Actually I have done heaps with ODBC, even wrote a custom ODBC toolkit back when I used to code in Delphi, to completely replace the dreadful BDE (Borland Database Engine). The problem I have is I don't do C++ and just getting some of the examples I've found to compile is a nightmare. The idea is simple, expose an ADO.NET driver to ODBC clients using a bridge. The main agony will be wrapping the ADO.NET driver into a COM DLL, hosting that inside the C++ ODBC driver, and doing the data translation between C# DataTables and ODBC's own internal structures. Doable, but I am not up to it from the C++ end of things. I have seen some toolkits from DataDirect and Simba, but these cost upwards of $2k, not within my budget, and they still require C++!

There is a really good business reason. Pretty much every application that works with data supports reading from an ODBC compliant driver or data source, so it is a big market of potential end-users, unlike my ADO.NET driver which is limited to being used only from within .NET itself. My app is a data provider, not consumer (in which case just using ADO.NET would have been fine). So I need to expose my data to the outside world and ODBC seems to still be the defacto standard after all this time.

I have a custom ADO.NET driver I have developed and it works just fine. However, I was thinking it would be great to be able to expose my data via ODBC as well, so I will need a custom ODBC driver that wraps around an ADO.NET driver, basically an ADO.NET -> ODBC bridge of sorts. I've seen several ODBC toolkits available but not being a C++ programmer I am pretty stuck in doing this myself. Does anyone know of a tool or open source project that offers something similar, an ADO.NET to ODBC bridge?

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