.Net Framework Essentials

ADO.NET Benefits

ADO.NET brings with it a number of benefits, which fall into the following categories:

Interoperability

The ability to communicate across heterogeneous environments.

Scalability

The ability to serve a growing number of clients without degrading system performance.

Productivity

The ability to quickly develop robust data access applications using ADO.NET’s rich and extensible component object model.

Performance

An improvement over previous ADO versions due to the disconnected data model.

Interoperability

All communication involves data exchange, whether the communication between distributed components is through a request/response methodology or a message-based facility. Current distributed systems assume that the components involved in the communication are using the same protocol and data format. This assumption is too restrictive if the client base must expand to cover the enterprise and beyond. Data-access layers should impose no such restrictions.

In current Microsoft Windows Distributed interNet Applications (DNA) Architechure, application components pass data back and forth as ADO disconnected recordsets. This requires the data-providing components, as well as the data-consuming components, to use the Component Object Model (COM). The payload, the actual content we are passing around, is packaged in a data format called Network Data Representation (NDR). These NDR packages are streamed between components.

There are two issues with current Windows DNA systems. ...