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

The DataSet

The DataSet is often described as an in-memory "cache" of relational data. Typically, the information in the DataSet closely resembles the raw data in the underlying data source. As the data source changes, it becomes more work to insulate the client against these changes and to ensure that the DataSet is still using the expected field names, data types, and data representations. The DataSet provides tools that make all of this possible, but they won’t help if you don’t realize all the assumptions that the client may make about the data in a DataSet. Worst of all, if the client uses the wrong table or column names, the mistake won’t appear at compile time, because ADO.NET can’t verify the string-based lookup on a DataSet. Instead, ...