The "DataWorks" team at Microsoft (the folks who invented ADO.NET) has been hard at work reinventing ADO.NET (again), and, yes, they managed to create yet another data access interface (YADAI) for Visual Studio 2005. To be fair, the DataWorks team feels the need to build data access and user interfaces to help developers from all levels of experience, from rank amateur to front-line professional. While the classes I discuss in this chapter won't help everyone, they can help some developers as they try to build many basic-to-intermediate applications. If you delve into SQL Server Everywhere you'll also find that these wizards and classes are an almost perfect fit. That's because the SSEv engine is designed to support small, single-user databases. Sure, developers (and applications) might outgrow these drag-and-drop and pick-from-a-dizzying-list-of-options UI code generators, but until they do, it's best to understand how they work, what they are capable of doing, and (most importantly) what they can't be expected to do. And, yes, these tools can help build serious applications, but with a number of limitations that I discuss throughout the book. The DataWorks team has been struggling with a number of problems. Some of these include:
Do the Data Source Configuration wizard and TableAdapter address these problems? Yes, they doat least, to a large extent. Many of the other issues are dealt with by fundamental changes in the .NET Framework and the CLR languages. Consider that Visual Studio has evolved over the last 8 years (or so) from a COM-based linkage builder to a code generator. In the Visual Basic 6.0 days, developers were encouraged to drag and drop (just as they are today), but the IDE was charged with connecting user-written code to the properties of canned (black-box) COM objects like the Data Environment Designer. The VB6 Data Object wizard (DOW) was the first prototype of the DataAdapter Configuration wizard, which further evolved into the Data Source Configuration wizard and TableAdapter code generators. Today, Visual Studio 2005 is a sophisticated code generatorthe volume and complexity of the code it generates is startling (and often intimidating). Fortunately, Visual Studio 2005 does a passable job of keeping this auto-generated code, hidden, correct, and protected from changes you make to other parts of the project. |