Essential ADO.NET

8.10. Implementing XML Infoset Providers

Since the introduction of ODBC, all generic data access methods have been based on relational concepts. APIs based on connections, statements (commands), and resultsets were the only choice. Since the introduction of XML, however, the XML Infoset has been the preferred object model for exposing data because of its tight integration with HTML-based Web pages and its availability on almost every computing platform. Web presentation itself has evolved from the notion of combining data and presentation in HTML pages to splitting presentation (HTML) from data (XML or other data object models). Therefore, an alternative to exposing data as resultsets using OLE DB providers or data providers is to expose data ...