Mono is really awesome. Some of our applications worked in linux out of the box even without recompiling the binary. However I am having tough time to configure oracle instantclient to use it with mono.

I installed instantclient on a CentOS VM(by installing instantclient rpm) but however I did not find TNSNAMES.ORA anywhere.

I searched for oracle and I found the following path contains the oracle libraries.

[root@bagvapp rupert]# ll /usr/lib/oracle/11.2/client/lib/
total 143280
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root     7456 Aug 14  2009 cobsqlintf.o
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root      342 Aug 14  2009 glogin.sql
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       17 Mar  9 06:52 libclntsh.so -> libclntsh.so.11.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 40088477 Aug 14  2009 libclntsh.so.11.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  6986848 Aug 14  2009 libnnz11.so
lrwxrwxrwx 1 root root       15 Mar  9 06:52 libocci.so -> libocci.so.11.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1879549 Aug 14  2009 libocci.so.11.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root 89377610 Aug 14  2009 libociei.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   152304 Aug 14  2009 libocijdbc11.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1501651 Aug 14  2009 libsqlplusic.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1218075 Aug 14  2009 libsqlplus.so
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   777979 Aug 14  2009 libsqora.so.11.1
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  1996228 Aug 14  2009 ojdbc5.jar
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root  2111220 Aug 14  2009 ojdbc6.jar
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root   298388 Aug 14  2009 ottclasses.zip
drwxr-xr-x 3 root root     4096 Mar  9 06:52 precomp
-rw-r--r-- 1 root root    37807 Aug 14  2009 xstreams.jar

no TNSPING available, no TNSNAMES.ORA, Now how to configure the mono to use this as the oracle client? and how to specify oracle database in app.config connection string section?

Though mono is a powerful framework, seems like it is having problems like linux does, all the documentation is only available in mailing lists and whatever is available on official site is either outdated or not clear for normal user.

Hope things will change soon and Mono will THE programming framework for linux.