Our .NET application uses ODP.NET with SDO_GEOMETRY which is a UDT for spatial functionality. Currently only the Oracle Unmanaged Driver supports UDT for use in ODP.NET. Although it looks like UDT support is definitely on the ODP.NET team's radar.
What I'm wondering is if there is a manual way to convert in and out of UDT based on a byte[] etc.
I know in the link I posted above that people are using WKT as a workaround, but we'd also be willing to entertain the idea of writing our own adapters for C# SDO Geometry, SDO_Point, etc. that have something like ToBytes() and FromBytes() if they could be used in a query.
Is it possible to cast the SHAPE attribute as a BLOB and then write some C# to deserialize it? Perhaps you would have to write your own PL/SQL functions to convert BLOBS to SDO_Geometry?
Because of the convenience of the managed driver, we would like to be able to use it, so we don't have to compile against multiple versions of the unmanaged driver and work within client environments that all have varying unmanaged client configurations.
The last fallback would be to pick one version of Oracle client and just require the customer to have that version of the unmanaged client installed, but they'd need to be aware of any gotchas that come with multiple side-by-side installations (PATH, GAC, machine.config, etc.)