I'm looking at working on a project which uses C#.NET (sitting on a windows box) as the primary language and PostgreSQL as the backend database (backend is sitting on a linux box). I've heard that ODBC.NET allows for easy integration of these two components.
Has anyone had experience actually setting C# and PostgreSQL up to work together? If so, do you have any suggestions about how to go about it, issues you've found, etc.?
I'm working with C# and Postgres using Npgsql2 component, and they work fast, I recommend you.
You can download from http://pgfoundry.org/projects/npgsql
Note: If you want an application that works with any database you can use the DbProviderFactory class and make your queries using IDbConnection, IDbCommand, IDataReader and/or IDbTransaction interfaces.
Today most languages/platforms (Java, .NET, PHP, Perl etc.) can work with almost any DBMS (SQL Server, Firebird, MySQL, Oracle, PostgresSQL etc.) so I wouldn't worry for one second. Sure there might be glitches and small problems but no showstopper.
As jalcom suggested you should program against a set of interfaces or at least a set of base classes (DbConnection, DbCommand and so on) to have an easily adaptable application.
You shouldn't have too many problems. As others have mentioned, there's many .Net PostgreSQL data providers available. One thing you may want to look out for is that features like Linq will probably not be able to be used.
There is a Linq provider for PostgreSQL at http://code2code.net/DB_Linq/.
We have developed several applications using visual studio 2005 with the devart ado.net data provider for PostgreSql (http://www.devart.com/pgsqlnet/).
One of the advantages of this provider is that it provides full Visual Studio support. The latest versions include all the new framework features like linq.