How do I create a Microsoft Jet (Access) database without an interop assembly?

c#, interop, jet

Solution

Before I throw away this code, it might as well live on stackoverflow

Something along these lines seems to do the trick:

if (!File.Exists(DB_FILENAME))
{
    var cnnStr = "Provider=Microsoft.Jet.OLEDB.4.0;Data Source=" + DB_FILENAME;

    // Use a late bound COM object to create a new catalog. This is so we avoid an interop assembly. 
    var catType = Type.GetTypeFromProgID("ADOX.Catalog");
    object o = Activator.CreateInstance(catType);
    catType.InvokeMember("Create", BindingFlags.InvokeMethod, null, o, new object[] {cnnStr});

    OleDbConnection cnn = new OleDbConnection(cnnStr);
    cnn.Open();
    var cmd = cnn.CreateCommand();
    cmd.CommandText = "CREATE TABLE VideoPosition (filename TEXT , pos LONG)";
    cmd.ExecuteNonQuery();

}

This code illustrates that you can access the database using OleDbConnection once its created with the ADOX.Catalog COM component.

Problem

I need to create an access (mdb) database without using the ADOX interop assembly. How can this be done?

Original source