Visual Studio® 2008 ALL-IN-ONE DESK REFERENCE FOR DUMMIES®

Chapter IV.3. Working with Strongly Typed DataSets

In This Chapter

Programmers have always needed a way to work with data in their applications. Accessing data from files or databases every time you need data is impractical. To accommodate the need to have programs access data quickly, programmers store data in memory, using everything from arrays to integers to custom data structures.

Instead of making you spend lots of time thinking about how to store data in memory, Microsoft created the DataSet to provide a standardized means of storing data in memory for quick access.

A DataSet works like an in-memory database. The DataSet has tables with columns and rows, and you create relations between tables. You can load data into a DataSet from a database, or you can enter new data into the DataSet. You can insert, delete, and update records. After you make all the changes to records in your DataSet, you commit those changes to the actual database.

Visual Studio provides the DataSet Designer for creating and manipulating DataSets. This chapter explains what a DataSet is and shows you how to use the DataSet Designer to create a special kind of DataSet, the strongly typed DataSet.

Understanding the DataSet

A DataSet is a resource provided by the Microsoft .NET Framework for storing data in memory. DataSets store data in tables, and you can create relations between tables, similar to how you create them in a database.

You use a DataSet to

• Store an in-memory copy of data from a database or other ...