ADO.NET Programming in Visual Basic™ .NET

An Overview of the DataSet

Now let’s look at the DataSet class. As we’ve said, the DataSet class is primarily used to read store and write XML data. It cannot access the database directly. In the previous chapter we examined the DataAdapter and showed how it is used to feed data into the DataSet. We did this from the perspective of the DataAdapter. Now we will do it from the perspective of the DataSet.

We said earlier that you do not have to know anything about XML to use the DataSet, but it does help. If we do nothing more than use the DataSet programmatically as an in-memory data cache for database tables we’ll never have to touch XML again. But this is only part of the power of the DataSet. If we want to use the full power of the DataSet ...