Summary

This chapter has provided you with a guide to some of the extra features that are exposed by the ADO.NET data providers that come with the .NET Framework. You saw how to create provider-agnostic code using provider factory lists and provider factories. In addition, you saw how you can use the DbConnectionStringBuilder class to create connection strings without knowing the specifics of the underlying provider at compile time. Finally, you saw how to squeeze a lot of extra functionality out of the data providers by enumerating data sources, querying metadata collections, and obtaining tracing and monitoring statistics for a given connection.