Introduction

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In July 2000, at the Microsoft Professional Developers Conference (PDC) in Orlando, FL, Bill Gates delivered his keynote speech. In this speech he discussed the future of application development, and how it will be so closely tied to the Internet that it would be hard to imagine an application that did not use the Internet in some fashion. Gates explained his vision for software as a service; software that can be provided on demand via the Internet using Web services. All of these things revolved around Microsoft's new strategy, something called the .NET Framework.

The .NET Framework is a completely new set of building blocks for application development, with the idea that all programming languages are created equal. In other words, all languages are created with the intent of enabling a programmer to write code efficiently to achieve the desired end result, whether that is a cataloging program, financial Web site, or a Web portal. The .NET Framework was built with the intent to allow every developer to use the programming language of his choice (eventually), and to increase the developer's efficiency.

After the keynote, the roughly 7,000 attendees of the PDC received the now infamous "pre-beta bits" of Visual Studio.NET. In a very short time, user groups and listservers began popping up all over the world. The programming community was genuinely interested in what .NET could potentially do for rapid application development. Over the next year more and more developers began taking notice and getting interested in developing applications with .NET.

As the .NET developer community grew, more and more people wanted to learn about ASP.NET and ADO.NET, two of the more significant advances bundled in the .NET Framework. ASP.NET is a completely new framework for building Web-based applications. While many of the classic ASP objects, such as Session, Application, Response and Request, exist in ASP.NET, don't be fooled. ASP.NET was written from the ground up, and was carefully planned to ensure that it would become the de facto standard for building rich Web-based applications.

In tandem with the development of ASP.NET, Microsoft began working to improve the data access strategy that could be employed with a Web-based application. The result is ADO.NET, the next evolution in Microsoft data access models. ADO.NET is a disconnected, message-based data access model. Behind the scenes ADO.NET relies heavily on XML. This allows ADO.NET to be platform independent, and interoperable with nearly any system, including legacy systems.

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