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20.2.1 Connector/NET Versions »
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20.2. MySQL Connector/NET

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20.2.1. Connector/NET Versions
20.2.2. Connector/NET Installation
20.2.3. Connector/NET Visual Studio Integration
20.2.4. Connector/NET Programming
20.2.5. Connector/NET Connection String Options Reference
20.2.6. Connector/NET API Reference
20.2.7. Connector/NET Support
20.2.8. Connector/NET FAQ

Connector/NET enables developers to easily create .NET applications that require secure, high-performance data connectivity with MySQL. It implements the required ADO.NET interfaces and integrates into ADO.NET aware tools. Developers can build applications using their choice of .NET languages. Connector/NET is a fully managed ADO.NET driver written in 100% pure C#.

Connector/NET includes full support for:

  • MySQL 5.4 features

  • MySQL 5.1 features

  • MySQL 5.0 features (such as stored procedures)

  • MySQL 4.1 features (server-side prepared statements, Unicode, and shared memory access, and so forth)

  • Large-packet support for sending and receiving rows and BLOBs up to 2 gigabytes in size.

  • Protocol compression which allows for compressing the data stream between the client and server.

  • Support for connecting using TCP/IP sockets, named pipes, or shared memory on Windows.

  • Support for connecting using TCP/IP sockets or Unix sockets on Unix.

  • Support for the Open Source Mono framework developed by Novell.

  • Fully managed, does not utilize the MySQL client library.

This document is intended as a user's guide to Connector/NET and includes a full syntax reference. Syntax information is also included within the Documentation.chm file included with the Connector/NET distribution.

If you are using MySQL 5.0 or later, and Visual Studio as your development environment, you may want also want to use the MySQL Visual Studio Plugin. The plugin acts as a DDEX (Data Designer Extensibility) provider, enabling you to use the data design tools within Visual Studio to manipulate the schema and objects within a MySQL database. For more information, see Section 20.2.3, “Connector/NET Visual Studio Integration”.

Note

Connector/NET 5.1.2 and later include the Visual Studio Plugin by default.

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