It seems that Microsoft is dropping their Oracle ADO.NET Data Provider and suggest to use a third-party one.

The Decision

After carefully considering all the options and talking to our customers, partners, and MVPs it was decided to deprecate OracleClient as a part of our ADO.NET roadmap. 

I kind of understand this decision, they want to improve ADO.NET but don’t want to invest resources supporting other competing database systems. However, I think this is very inconvenient for .NET developers in general. This will force us to research which vendor has the appropriate library and pay for it. And of course, take another external dependency.

Good news for those vendors though.