Appendix

Appendix

Some Helpful ADO.NET Wizards

Many grizzled programmers have a pathological distrust of software wizards, and many wizards have definitely had a dark side to them. They were often buggy and incomplete. The wizards provided in Visual Studio .NET, however, are powerful, robust, and rich with features. Although I've been one of those who distrusted wizards, with Microsoft .NET we should see them for what they are—timesaving tools on the one hand, and teaching mechanisms on the other.

In this appendix, I'll briefly examine two of the most powerful wizards used with ADO.NET, the Data Form Wizard and the Crystal Report Wizard. The Data Form Wizard allows you to easily build a fully functional database application without writing a single line of code. The Crystal Report Wizard helps build reports about the information in these database applications that can be shown on the screen or exported in several formats and distributed via e-mail.