Chapter 8. Database Access with ADO.NET and XML

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One of the most compelling aspects of web development is the ability to dynamically create web pages based on data from a database. Most web applications involve retrieving, displaying, manipulating, and updating data contained in a database. Because you have likely done some ASP programming, this chapter assumes that you have some experience working with a database and that you are at least casually familiar with ADO. If you are not, read on anyway: Much of the material actually has little to do with database programming and has everything to do with XML. This chapter describes much of ADO.NET by comparing it to classic ADO, but works with XML under the covers and using ADO.NET for an abstraction of the underlying XML.

Database programming is a broad category, with concepts such as structured query language, transactions, and indexing and the performance of each easily comprises its own book. This chapter doesn't completely cover ADO.NET. There is so much material to cover in ADO.NET that it can (and likely will) be the subject of entire books on its own. Instead, this chapter focuses on the following:

• ADO's evolution to ADO.NET

• Some of the .NET classes used to work with data retrieved from a database

• Creating typed DataSets

• Binding a DataSet to a data-aware control

This chapter refers to classic ADO simply as ADO, and it refers to the ADO implementation in the .NET Framework SDK as ADO.NET.

So far, you have seen different ways of working with XML documents through the use of data islands in Internet Explorer, client-side DOM, MSXML Parser, System.Xml classes, and <asp:> server controls.

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