Chapter 25: Data Binding

Overview

The heart of any business application is data. Think of all the data a company holds describing employee details, such as salary and job descriptions, customer details, and so on. Most of the programs you write will access external data like this in some way, whether the program is a simple data-entry application that allows personnel staff to enter and edit employee details in their database or a full-blown e-commerce Web site that reads the product catalog and customer details such as credit card numbers and shipping addresses from a back-end database.

Chapter 24 gave you a detailed overview of ADO.NET, its class structure, and component parts. However, the good news is that you don't have to write all this detailed code to get a database application up and running.

In this chapter, you will learn:

• How to use VS2005 to connect to a database

• How to browse database objects with the Server Explorer

• How to get VS2005 to do almost all of the hard work of writing business applications for databases

• How to use VS2005's powerful features to write a simple data-driven application without having to worry too much about the C# ADO.NET code, which VS2005 generates for you

• How to use VS2005 to make data binding, the process of writing user interface objects that are bound to an underlying database connection, very easy!

For those of you who love to write pages upon pages of code to get even the simplest task done, this chapter is not for you! For those of you who enjoy getting your job done well but quickly in order to have a life, welcome!