Windows Forms Programming in Visual Basic .NET

Data Sets

The main unit of any data-centric application is the data set, a data-provider-neutral collection of tables with optional relationship and constraint information. Each data set contains data tables, each of which consists of zero or more data rows, which hold the actual data. In addition, each data table contains individual data columns, which have metadata that describes the type of data each data row can contain.

A data set can be populated by hand but is most commonly populated via a data adapter, which knows how to speak a data-provider-specific protocol to get and set the data. The data adapter uses a data connection, which is a communications pipe to the data itself, whether it lives on a file in the file system or in a database ...