Programming ASP.NET 3.5, 4th Edition

Getting Started with ADO.NET

Create a new website called C9_ADONET and add a new web form to it called SimpleADONetGridView.aspx. Drag a GridView onto the page and accept all of its default values. Do not attach a data source. Switch to the code-behind file. In the code-behind page, you will create a DataSet and then assign one of the tables from that DataSet to the DataSource property of the GridView.

To get started, add to your source code a using statement for the SqlClient namespace:

using System.Data.SqlClient;

You’ll need to add this using statement in all the examples in this chapter.

With that done, you will implement the Page_Load method to get the SalesLT.Customer table from the AdventureWorksLT database and bind it to your GridView. You do this in a series of steps:

1. Create a connection string and a command string.

2. Pass the strings to the constructor of the SqlDataAdapter.

3. Create an instance of a DataSet.

4. Ask the DataAdapter to fill the DataSet.

5. Extract the table from the DataSet.

6. Bind the GridView to that table.

The complete source code for this example is shown in Example 9-1.

Example 9-1. SimpleADONetGridView.aspx.cs in full

using System;
using System.Data;
using System.Data.SqlClient;
using System.Web.UI;

public partial class SimpleADONetGridView : Page
{
    protected void Page_Load(object sender, EventArgs e)
    {
       // 1. Create the connection string and command string
       string connectionString =
         "Data Source=<your_Database>;Initial Catalog=AdventureWorksLT;" + "Integrated Security=True"; ...