Visual Studio® 2010 All-in-One For Dummies®

Chapter 5. Under the Hood with ADO.NET

In This Chapter

• Using the .NET Framework Data Providers

• Connecting to data sources

• Managing connection strings

• Executing commands

• ccessing data with DataReaders

• Filling DataSets with DataAdapters

• Converting DataSets to XML

• Using ADO.NET in the real world

Visual Studio provides many controls, designers, editors, and wizards for accessing data in Windows and Web applications. These tools are made possible by ADO.NET, the data access technology of the .NET Framework.

ADO.NET provides a common coding structure for accessing data, regardless of the data source. The Visual Studio data access tools, such as DataSet Designer, generate ADO.NET code behind the scenes for you. This chapter shows you how to "get under the hood" with ADO.NET and write your own ADO.NET code to access your data.

Note

ADO is short for ActiveX Data Objects, the previous version of the data access technologies, before the .NET Framework was introduced.

Meet the Players

The purpose of ADO.NET is to provide a simplified model for data access, regardless of the underlying data source. By using a model like ADO.NET, developers can improve their productivity because they use one data access model — ADO.NET — to access many different kinds of data sources.

ADO.NET provides a set of common components for accessing data:

• .NET Framework Data Provider: Acts as a bridge between your application and a data source. Providers are available for many popular databases, including SQL Server and Oracle. When ...