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Connecting to a Database

To access data in a database, you must first establish a connection using an ADO.NET connection object. Two connection objects are included in the .NET Framework: the OleDbConnection object (for working with the same OLE DB data providers you would access through traditional ADO) and the SqlConnection object (for optimized access to Microsoft SQL Server). Because these examples connect to the Microsoft Jet Database, you'll be using the OleDbConnection object. To create an object variable of type OleDbConnection and initialize the variable to a new connection, you could use a statement such as the following:

OleDbConnection cnADONetConnection = new OleDbConnection();

To use ADO.NET, the first step that you need to take ...