Building e-Commerce Sites with the .NET Framework

Component Development

Chapter 4, “Building MyGolfGear.NET's Product Catalog with SQL Server 2000,” discussed the database design for the simple catalog requirements. Now we need a programmatic way to interact with the database objects. The functionality needed to add, update, and delete items from the product catalog has been encapsulated in a component layer, as illustrated in Figure 5.1.

The Catalog Dataset

With previous versions of ADO, you had access to Recordset variables via late-bound, weakly typed variables. ADO.NET provides strongly typed, early-bound access to data members via strongly typed datasets.

Note

Strongly typed datasets are classes derived from System.Data.DataSet. So, a strongly typed dataset inherits properties and methods ...