Chapter 39. Connection Strings

A large proportion of applications need to persist data, and the obvious candidate for enterprise software is a relational database. The .NET Framework provides support for working with SQL Server, SQL Server Compact Edition, Oracle, ODBC, and OLE DB databases. To connect to any of these databases, you need to specify a connection string that determines the location, the database, authentication information, and other connection parameters. This chapter explains how to create and store connection strings. In addition, you learn about encrypting and working with connection strings in code.