Chapter 2: Building ADO.NET Applications with the DataForm Wizard

Everyone Loves a Demo

I've learned from the developer conferences I've attended and spoken at, especially those geared toward Microsoft Visual Basic, that everyone loves a good demo. It's so much easier to discuss features and look at code once you've seen that code in action. So I'll start this discussion with a demo.

The Visual Studio .NET Data Form Wizard helps you build a data-bound form in a few simple steps. In this chapter, we'll use the wizard to build a data-bound form that allows you to retrieve data from a database, view and modify that data, and send the changes back to the database. We'll then look at the code that the wizard generated as a preview of the coming chapters. This simple application will serve as a working example of many of the objects, features, and concepts covered in later chapters.

	Many developers hate wizards. Well, maybe hate is too strong a word, but developers often don't trust wizards, especially ones that use "black-box technology." Fortunately, the Visual Studio .NET Data Form Wizard generates code that you can examine and modify.

This chapter is designed to help you create a simple application using the sample Northwind database. Products such as Microsoft SQL Server, Microsoft Access, and Microsoft Data Engine (MSDE) include this database. The structure of the Northwind database might vary slightly from one product or version to the next, but it always contains tables such as Customers, Orders, Products, and Employees. This chapter assumes that you have access to a Northwind database.