ADO.NET in a Nutshell

Chapter 13. Strongly Typed DataSets

Strongly typed DataSets are a collection of classes that inherit from the DataSet, DataTable, and DataRow classes, and provide additional properties, methods, and events based on the DataSet schema. These methods, properties, and events allow, among other things, named properties and methods to be used to retrieve column values, access parent and child records, find rows, and handle null column values.

It is important to remember that strongly typed DataSets are in fact just a collection of classes. Because the strongly typed DataSet classes inherit from DataSet, DataTable, and DataRow, all the functionality present in those classes can be used just as it is for the untyped classes. The development environment just provides a way to automatically generate consistent and efficient strongly typed DataSet classes.

Using a strongly typed DataSet has a number of advantages over using untyped DataSet:

• Schema information is contained within the strongly typed DataSet. This results in an improvement in performance over retrieving schema information at runtime. Of course, the schema of an untyped DataSet can also be defined programmatically.

• Programming is more intuitive, and code is easier to maintain. Table and field names are accessed through properties rather than indexer arguments. The Visual Studio .NET IDE provides autocomplete functionality for these names. As an example, the following code demonstrates accessing data using both an untyped and strongly ...