At the time of this writing (November 4, 2011), this custom-made installer is (almost) all you need to start using Firebird database management system from your Visual Studio 2010.
Of course, you need a Firebird database server: either on your machine or on an accessible server.
This GUI-based utility (see screenshots below) will install and properly configure 2 things:
(1) Firebird .NET Provider.
(2) Firebird DDEX Provider.
The 2nd one provides (among other things) support for Visual Studio 2010 Entity Framework Designer, which is exactly why I created this installer: setting up the DDEX provider manually is a process which is both time-consuming and error-prone.
(To be quite honest, it took me several attempts to get it right, while the installer is supposed to do things correctly within just a few seconds.)
The 0.9.0.0 release works fine for Visual Studio 2010.
But, as you can see from the screenshots, it is designed to be used for Visual Studio 2005 and/or 2008 as well.
If you find any bugs, please report them here.
You need .NET Framework Runtime version 3.5 or later (4.0 is fine!..) in order to be able to run this installer.
IMHO, using a nice-looking GUI-based installer always beats having to manually mess with config files and Windows Registry.
Enjoy!
