Professional DevExpress™ ASP.NET Controls

Chapter 7. Using the Data That Makes Sense for Your Solution

An interesting quote published in "Build Blazing Fast Windows and ASP.NET Applications with DevExpress LINQ-Enabled Grid Controls" on http://aspalliance.com reads: "No matter how well one designs a data controller, it will never do its job well if one fails to recognize that database specific operations ought to be executed on the database server. No matter how ingenious the algorithms — no matter how brilliant the technology ... if the grid is forced to manage data itself, you can bet that a large dataset will eventually bring the server or the Windows Smart Client to its knees and make the application totally unusable." Published by DevExpress, this quote represents DevExpress's interests to some extent, but there is an important underlying idea as well. Managing databases and data is still hard, there is no current trend on a single technology, and in fact the opposite of that is true: There are more ways to connect to your data than ever before.

Having been a code slinger for 20 years now, I have seen a lot of history. Data technologies have improved, but now we have many more choices: LINQ for SQL, nHibernate, ADO.NET, eXpress Persistent Objects (DevExpress's XPO), to name a few. During much of the last decade, developers (or technologists or managers) picked a database technology, and if they were .NET programmers, they generally settled on a provider — elements of the .NET framework, such as OleDB — that provided ...