Terms you'll need to understand:
Techniques you'll need to master:
Few applications will be completely monolithic (that is, operate without communicating with other files). Most applications will interact with some type of external datawhether in the form of a database, an array of values retrieved from a disk file, or some other form of data storage. In this chapter, we review the process of linking data to the user interface and accessing only the data the user needs. Then Chapter 6, "Consuming and Manipulating Data," covers consuming and manipulating this data. One of the more important programming tasks you may face is the connection of data to the user interface, which is referred to as data binding . An application's data model can include many data sources, such as databases, arrays of values, XML files, or data values stored using objects within the System.Collections namespace. It is often not desirable to provide all possible records to the user at one time, thus requiring data filtering to extract only the target data. At other times, data might not be stored in a user-friendly form, requiring you to change it to a more useful format before presenting it within the user interface. |