Introduction

Microsoft ADO.NET 2.0 represents a major improvement in data access capabilities. You'll see little resemblance between the object model in the original release of ADO included in Microsoft Visual Studio 6 and the improved object model in the new release included in Visual Studio 2005. ADO.NET 2.0 contains many changes that simplify development by requiring less code, and it has new capabilities that enable you to write more database-agnostic code, which means you will have a much easier time writing code without knowledge of the database server that will be used.

This book dives deep into advanced implementations of the new and old ADO.NET features that make up the current release. Complex problems rarely have a single solution, so I offer a comparative analysis whenever possible to highlight the benefits and drawbacks of several possible solutions.

Who This Book Is For

Although this book does cover advanced topics, readers are not expected to be advanced programmers, but it is important that you have solid programming skills and experience using Visual Studio. Every chapter starts by laying the foundation for the topic covered in the chapter. To help you understand the topics covered later in the book, the first two chapters even give you an overview of the ADO.NET classes. If you understand the need to store data in a database and have had some experience using any version of ADO, this book is for you.

If you are already familiar with the material covered in a given chapter, then by all means, skip ahead as needed, and don't forget that in many cases the index can direct you straight to the solution for a problem that you are trying to solve.