Chapter 20
Moving from ADO to ADO.NET
Let s face it most Microsoft Visual Basic applications have some sort of data access. If your application uses ActiveX Data Objects (ADO), you probably want to know what improvements you can make now that you are upgrading to Visual Basic .NET. The .NET Framework offers a whole new set of controls and services, including ADO.NET. Naturally, you will want to take advantage of some or all of these new features. From the developer s standpoint, you have three options available:
Adapt your usage of ADO to better interoperate with the .NET Framework objects.
Upgrade your ADO code to ADO.NET.
Do both.
This chapter introduces the concepts and class hierarchy of ADO.NET. Then it provides an overview of how to use your existing ADO code within your .NET application to bind data to controls and support ADO Recordsets with XML Web services. For the more adventurous among you, the last part of this chapter offers some guidance on how to migrate your existing ADO code to ADO.NET.