Visual Basic® Programmer's Guide to the .NET Framework Class Library

Queries and Resultsets

One of the simplest actions you can perform against a database is to retrieve data from a table. Let's assume you are writing an interface into a Human Resources database and need to retrieve a list of employees' last names from the employee table.

Establishing a Connection

Using ADO.NET, how would you approach this relatively simple task? Normally, the first step is to establish a connection to the desired database. For this example, we make the following assumptions: the HR database we are interested in resides inside a Microsoft SQL Server 2000 database, on a server called HR-DB01. The database itself is called “dbHumanRes,” and the table that holds all the employee records is called “employee.”

We also assume that a ...