Introduction

ASP.NET and ADO.NET pack a powerful combined punch. However, speaking from experience, a basic Hello, World!–style application will not help you build real data-aware Web applications. I can tell you that building data-aware Web applications with ASP.NET and ADO.NET is vastly superior to building them with plain-vanilla ASP and ADO. Instead of trying to capture the essence of ASP.NET and ADO.NET programming in the introduction, let's just get started. I will show you some of the cool and useful tasks you can accomplish.