Having already followed the advice in the SAP website documentation and installed the developer edition of SQLAnywhere 17, and also having manually run the installer for VS integration that is provided by this installation I still could not see any providers other than the MSSQL ones while creating an EF6 model in Visual Studio 2017.
I found this https://www.nuget.org/packages/Sap.Data.SQLAnywhere.EF6/17.0.7.3399
Does anyone know where to find documentation on how to use it? Nuget provides no links to documentation and does not list a repo.
I installed the package without incident and it appears in project references but it does not appear in the provider list when I try to create an EF model.
A request to the package author provoked this response:
Hi Peter,
For information and documentation go to: https://sqlanywhere-forum.sap.com/
or with SyBase http://infocenter.sybase.com/help/index.jsp?topic=/com.sybase.infocenter.dc01776.1604/doc/html/san1357754863708.html
Kind Regards, Erwin Bakels
While I appreciate the prompt response, the documentation link leads to information about doing another thing with a different version -- it's for code-first with EF4.3 while the library is for EF6 and I need database-first. To be fair to Erwin, I didn't explicitly tell him I wanted database-first, but it's still not a usable answer.
Further research suggests that changes in VS2017 prevent the installer from registering the provider correctly. This implies that until such time as SAP updates the installer to suit VS2017 there is no possibility of designer support for EF with SQL Anywhere.
I have confirmed with SAP support, that Sql Anywhere ADO.NET integration with Visual Studio is not supported in VS2017. You will have to use VS2015 or earlier.