Microsoft® Visual Studio® 2010 Unleashed

Object Relational Mapping

We have spent most of this chapter covering the “standard” process for creating .NET applications that read and write data that resides in a database. Although Visual Studio and the ADO.NET libraries themselves do a lot to abstract away the difficult pieces of that process, problems still remain. In fact, there is one common problem that developers writing database-driven applications face: the mismatch between an application’s normal object-oriented programming model, implemented in C# or Visual Basic, and the relational programming model surfaced in databases or datasets, implemented primarily with SQL.

In the object-oriented world, we manipulate objects via methods and properties, and each object itself can be (and ...