Chapter 7 ADO.NET Data Providers

Overview

ADO.NET is a data-access subsystem in the Microsoft .NET Framework. It was heavily inspired by ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), which has emerged over the past few years as a very successful object model for writing data-aware applications. The key design criteria for ADO.NET are simplicity and performance. Those criteria typically work against each other, but with ADO.NET you get the power and performance of a low-level interface combined with the simplicity of a modern object model. Unlike ADO, though, ADO.NET has been purposely designed to observe general, rather than database-oriented, guidelines.

Several syntactical differences exist between the object models of ADO and ADO.NET. In spite of this, the functionalities of ADO and ADO.NET look much the same. This is because Microsoft put a lot of effort in aligning some programming aspects of the ADO.NET object model with ADO. In this way, seasoned data developers new to .NET don't need to become familiar with too many new concepts and can work with a relatively short learning curve. With ADO.NET, you probably won't be able to reuse much of your existing code. You'll certainly be able, though, to reuse all your skills. At the same time, novice developers face a relatively simple and easy-to-understand model, with a consistent design and a powerful set of features.

The ADO.NET framework is made of two distinct but closely related sets of classes data providers and data containers. We tackle providers in this chapter and save containers for the next chapter.