Chapter 1 -- Introduction

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Chapter 1

"I wish I'd known that before I started writing all this code."

You might be surprised at how often I've heard developers say something to this effect after I've explained to them how ADO works and what's going on under the covers.

For nearly four years I've been employed as a support professional—inexplicably, we're no longer called support engineers—in Microsoft Developer Support, working primarily with customers who are having trouble using Microsoft Visual Basic to build database applications. Lately, I've been surprised by the number of programmers who are having difficulty building applications with ADO. Discerning a pattern to the questions, I decided to write this book in the hope of sharing my knowledge of ADO with a greater number of programmers than I can speak to individually. If this book can help reduce the volume of support calls I handle in the process, that's a pleasant bonus.