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

Chapter 3. Disconnected Data: The Universal Language

I’ve often described the Microsoft .NET Framework as a collection of several not-so-minor revolutions bundled into a single platform, and data access is no exception. ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), Microsoft’s previous COM-based data access technology, has been redesigned and rebuilt in the form of ADO.NET. And although ADO.NET bears some superficial similarities to ADO, it shifts the focus to distributed applications and the scalability considerations they entail. That isn’t to say that you can’t create a distributed application that connects to a database using ADO technology—in fact, with proper design practices, ADO still works like a charm. The problem is that many developers either ignored ...