MCAD/MCSD Training Guide (70-320): Developing XML Web Services and Server Components with Visual C#™ .NET and the Microsoft .NET Framework

Creating and Using Strongly Typed DataSet Objects

Create and manipulate DataSets: Create a strongly typed DataSet.

The best way to understand strongly typed DataSet objects is to see what you can do with one syntactically. Suppose you have a normal DataSet object, and you've extracted a DataTable object named dt from this DataSet object. Then you can refer to a value in the DataTable object with any of these syntaxes:

dt.Rows[0][0]
dt.Rows[0]["ColumnName"]

All these syntaxes have one thing in common: They're all late-bound. That is, .NET doesn't know until runtime that ColumnName is a valid column name in the DataTable. By contrast, in a strongly typed DataSet, the columns actually become properties of the row. With a strongly typed DataSet ...