ADO.NET 3.5 Cookbook, 2nd Edition

11.15. Enumerating OLE DB Providers

Problem

You need a list of the OLE DB providers installed on the machine running your code.

Solution

Use the OleDbEnumerator.GetElements() method, the OleDbEnumerator.GetEnumerator() method, a SQL Server extended stored procedure, or search the registry. The solution demonstrates these four approaches.

The first approach uses the GetElements() method of the OleDbEnumerator class to retrieve a list of visible OLE DB providers and output them to the console.

The second approach uses the static GetEnumerator() method of the OleDbEnumerator class to retrieve a list of OLE DB providers and output them to the console.

The third approach executes the extended stored procedure xp_enum_oledb_providers. The result set containing the installed OLE DB providers is output to the console.

In the fourth approach, the sample code uses the Microsoft.Win32.Registry class to examine the registry, identify OLE DB provider subkeys, and retrieve and display the OLE DB provider names from these subkeys.

The C# code in Program.cs in the project EnumerateOleDbProviders is shown in Example 11-18.

Example 11-18. File: Program.cs for EnumerateOleDbProviders solutions

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.Data.OleDb;
using Microsoft.Win32;

namespace EnumerateOleDbProviders
{
    class Program
    {
        static void Main(string[] args)
        {
            // Enumerate OLE DB providers using GetElements( ) OleDbEnumerator e = new OleDbEnumerator( ); DataTable dt = e.GetElements( ...