Day 10. Accessing Data with ADO.NET
Most of the applications that you write must access some sort of data store. Today, you learn about data access in .NET. ActiveX Data Objects .NET (ADO.NET) is the technology used in the .NET Framework for all database access. Before .NET, the main technology for data access was ActiveX Data Objects (ADO). ADO was great, but it had its drawbacks. But when there's only one way to do something, as with ADO and accessing data, it's easy to forget about the drawbacks and just work with what you have. Microsoft set out to fix all of these drawbacks in ADO.NET, which was written from the ground up specifically for data access in .NET and the challenges that developers face in the disconnected environment of the Internet. Today, you learn
The ADO.NET architecture and how it differs from ADO
How to connect to databases with the Connection object
How to use DataReaders
How to use the Command object
How to use DataAdapters
How to use DataSets
How to filter and sort DataSets with DataViews
Databinding fundamentals in Windows Forms
Note
Today, you learn about the ADO.NET classes and how to write data access code. Tomorrow, you'll learn how to use the built in wizards and add-ins in Visual Studio .NET to automate building data access applications. Understanding the ADO.NET classes will help you debug and modify the code written by the wizards that you'll learn about tomorrow. On Day 13, “XML Web Services in .NET,” you learn more about databinding controls and Web Forms. Today, we concentrate on understanding ADO.NET and Windows Forms.