Microsoft® .NET Distributed Applications: Integrating XML Web Services and .NET Remoting

The ADO.NET Object Family

The ADO.NET types are a part of the .NET Framework class library and are found in the namespaces that begin with System.Data.

Here’s the 60-second overview:

• System.Data contains generic classes that are independent of the type of data source or the mechanism used to connect to it. The most important of these is the DataSet, which contains collections of other generic classes such as DataTable, DataRow, and DataColumn. There are also a number of generic interfaces (such as IDbCommand and IDbConnection) that are implemented by all provider-specific objects.

• System.Data.SqlClient contains the classes required to connect to a Microsoft SQL Server (7.0 or later) database using the highly efficient Tabular Data Stream (TDS) interface. ...