I am creating a .NET program that uses odp.net, specifically the 11g version. Our oracle server is running 10g. I am too late in the development process to make a change. Am I heading for trouble? Have you had any experience running 11g client against a 10g server?
Yes, that's OK. Oracle advises that the client version should be >= the server version.
You can use odp.net 11 with Oracle server 9, 10 and 11. And yes I have tried all those combinations.
You can use for example odp.net 11 for retrieving geographical information (datatype=mdsys.sdo_geometry) from the Oracle server 9, 10 and 11. I use this example beacuse the possibility to select mdsys.sdo_geometry data has been added to odp.net 11.
See the following document on Metalink.
This contains a matrix of ODP Driver Version, Supported Operating System, SQL*Net, RDBMS, .NET Framework, Visual Studio
Subject: Oracle Data Provider for .NET (ODP) Supported Configurations Doc ID: 726240.1
Using an Oracle 11 client against a 10g database will work. I have previously used the 11g client against a 9i database as well.