Working with Data

Being able to create data-management applications quickly and effectively using Visual Basic has always been at the heart of Visual Basic development. At some point all Visual Basic developers will work with data in some form. Visual Basic 6 had some good ways to work with data, as well as all the features available in ADO. Visual Basic .NET is no exception. In fact, there are many great improvements in the way you can work with data in the .NET Framework, in addition to great improvements in the area of DataBinding. However, the concepts used in ADO have somewhat changed in ADO.NET and is often viewed as one of the larger sections of .NET to learn while moving from VB 6.

This chapter introduces the new object model in ADO.NET and how it relates to ADO, while pointing out why these changes were made and how you can take advantage of them. It also explains how to take advantage of data binding in a Windows Forms application and how powerful and flexible it is. Visual Studio .NET has a lot of tools built-in to help you when working with data in your VB.NET projects; this chapter goes through these features and discusses how to use them as well.