Windows Developer Power Tools

5.0 Introduction

As a reader of this book, you most likely write code for a living, and you’re (hopefully) concerned with bringing value to your development process. Value is added when you’re able to focus on solving tough problems like business logic and can figure out ways to automate the simple, recurring tasks in your day. Having a structured, repeatable process in place further increases your development cycle’s value, and it saves you from having to repeatedly work through monotonous tasks like writing data-access code.

Developing data-access layers is an example of a mundane and repetitious task that you’ll want to automate, because it involves writing the same insert, select, update, and delete methods and stored procedures over and over again.

Tip

Insert, select, update, and delete methods or stored procedures are often referred to as CRUD, for Create, Retrieve, Update, and Delete.

You’ll need each of those methods and stored procedures for almost every table in your database, and you might also be dealing with populating business objects to carry data from those tables to different components in your system.

Tip

Business objects or business entities are often used in place of datasets to carry data through systems. Business objects use simple classes to store data. For example, a Customer object might hold the customer’s name, ID, and contact information.

To make things worse, this kind of repetitive work is rife with potential for injecting bugs into your code. Typing similar ...