Does Microsoft Jet DB work with Entity Framework?

Saher Ahwal picture Saher Ahwal · Jun 25, 2012 · Viewed 22.7k times · Source

In this forum here , someone mentions that Entity Framework does not work with Access (Jet DB - .mdb). However it seems that there is a provider for Jet DB as described here

Which makes me think that the only thing I need with Entity Framework is to define the follwing before I define the models:

<connectionStrings>  
    <add name="ProductContext"
         providerName="Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0"
         connectionString="Source=C:\mydatabase.mdb;Jet OLEDB:Database
                           Password=MyDbPassword;"/>
</connectionStrings> 

Does anyone know if Entity Framework works fine with Jet DB, I want to make sure it does before I start since my design document depends on this fact.

Thanks

Answer

EkoostikMartin picture EkoostikMartin · Jun 25, 2012

Entity Framework does not support OLEDB connections, so your connection string will not work. It is practically impossible to get Entity Framework to collaborate with MS Access. You will either need to dump the MS Access part of your design, or the Entity Framework part.

The closest you could get using MS Access is using strongly typed datasets and Linq-to-DataSet http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/bb386977.aspx

Or, considering going with SQL Express instead (it's free) http://www.microsoft.com/sqlserver/en/us/editions/2012-editions/express.aspx