Deploy C# application with Access Database, without access instalation

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Context
For a bit more context, the company I work for made an Access vb.net application that runs inside MS Access. They wanted to upgrade and create a C# WPF frontend for it. This works great except for the fact that when I installed the application and downloaded the [dummyDB].accdb (32-bits 2016) the application immediatly broke with the error :
The 'Microsoft.ACE.OLEDB.12.0' provider is not registered on the local machine.
I then installed the 2010 AccessDataBaseEngine from Microsoft and a new error apeared:
This Database file requires a newer version of Access
Naturally I went back to Microsoft, downloaded and installed the 2016 x64 (my system is 64-bits) and tried again.

Sadly we we're back to the first error. So i tried to install the 2016 32-bits AccessDataBaseEngine but ran into the problem that I had already installed 64-bits office products. (I also uninstalled all the previous 32-bit AccessDataseEngines)

We of course don't want users to reinstall all their Office products just to use our application.

Question

  1. Is there a NugetPackage of somesort that we could use so the customer can interact with the AccessDatabase out of the box?
  2. If not, is there anyway to make it so they wouldn't have to reinstall all of their Office products?

ps. Different DataBase files 32-bit and 64-bit for users is also not an option because different users with most likely different systems will have to access the same database file.

I don't know if I'm being completely oblivious here, but any help would be greatly appreciated

Application info:

  • WPF application (.Net Framework 4.7.2)
  • Build Target : anyCPU
oledb ms-access c#
1 Answers

Is there a NugetPackage of somesort that we could use so the customer can interact with the AccessDatabase out of the box

No, not as far as I know.

If not, is there anyway to make it so they wouldn't have to reinstall all of their Office products?

You could write an wrapper that handles both 32 and 64 bit versions of the access driver. I.e. if the installed driver is the same platform as your program you can just continue as usual. If it is another platform you need to start a new process with the correct platform, and delegate all the database work to this process. If your process is anyCPU and is run on 64-bit windows the actual platform will depend on the "prefer 32-bit" flag.

Another alternative is to build both 32 and 64 bit versions of your entire application and run the one matching the office installation. This might be easier, but might not work if you have other platform specific dependencies.

This all assumes that office is already installed, if it is not you can just deploy the stand alone ace driver (i.e. AccessDataBaseEngine) with the correct bittness. The database file itself is platform agnostic and can be accessed by either 32 or 64 bit processes. It is the driver that needs to be of the correct version.

Note that Access is kind of difficult to work with and rather error prone. If this product is intended to be long lived I would suggest migrating to something better sooner rather than later. SqlLite is a popular embedded database engine that could be an alternative.

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