A Programmer's Introduction to Visual Basic® .NET

Summary

As you can see, ADO.NET represents a major change in the way of thinking about accessing and working with data. ADO.NET can operate in either a connected or disconnected mode, just as ADO could. However, ADO.NET uses separate objects for working with connected and disconnected data.

ADO.NET uses managed providers to access data. Each managed provider provides its own set of objects. The SQL Server managed provider, for example, provides objects such as the SqlConnection and SqlDataReader objects. The OLE DB managed provider provides OleDbConnection and OleDbDataReader objects.

For connected data access, ADO.NET uses a Connection object to connect to the database, a Command object to issue SQL statements or call stored procedures, and ...