Hour 20. Database Access

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If you've been using computers for a while now, you may remember the early days of the World Wide Web. When it first arrived, the Web was just a collection of images and static text. Later, the emergence of animation and sound broke up the monotony, but static text still prevailed. Then, one of the biggest technological advancements that transformed the Web from a source of information to a viable application platform was the emergence of server-side data access.

The use of data within databases has been around for a long time, but there hasn't been a shortage or slowdown of advancements in the field. The redesign of ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) within Visual Studio .NET is a testament to this fact. This redesign was so drastic that ActiveX doesn't really play a part in ADO.NET; however, the name, ActiveX Data Objects, was kept. As you will see in this hour, database access has changed substantially to keep up with the changing data-access models currently in use today.

In this hour you will learn:

• How and why database access, specifically ADO.NET, is designed

• How to connect to a DataStore and specify a command to fill a DataSet object

• How to retrieve and navigate through data within a DataSet object

• How to insert and delete data and then save the updated database

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