What s Missing in the TableAdapter?


What's Missing in the TableAdapter?

Not everyone likes the new Visual Studio 2005 TableAdapter class. According to Sahil Malik[3] (to paraphrase a recent newsgroup exchange)...

[3] Sahil is the author of Pro ADO.NET 2.0 (Apress, 2005).

  • TableAdapter classes "suck eggs" with Systems.Transactions and don't have built-in transaction support.

  • They are "single-table" centric. That is (if I understand his point), the TableAdapter encourages developers to simply point to a single database table and build a direct interface to selected columns from that (entire) table. As you'll see later in this chapter, you have to take several additional steps to refine (define) the WHERE clause or otherwise limit/focus the rowset.

  • They are "impossible to make work with multiple tables in hierarchical scenarios (or) concurrent environments." It seems that Microsoft's intention was to eliminate the need to manually code the Relation objects when building a hierarchical data structure. They did that, but does it really make it easier to manage these hierarchies with ADO.NET? That remains to be seen.

  • They are "unwieldy to maintain as your db (database) structures changes." I agree.

He goes on to list several other points, but you get the idea. Part of the problem is that the TableAdapter and Data Source interface is new and not fully understood or appreciated. That said, just because it's new does not make it "improved" or suitable for anything. This problem is exacerbated by hiding the old tools, which just confuses customers and encourages (forces) them to use the new toolsregardless of how well they address the problem at hand. No, I think the jury is still out on the TableAdapterand they aren't wearing smiles.




Hitchhiker's Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server(c) Best Practice Architectures and Examples
Hitchhikers Guide to Visual Studio and SQL Server: Best Practice Architectures and Examples, 7th Edition (Microsoft Windows Server System Series)
ISBN: 0321243625
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 227

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