Resolving Data Access Issues

Chapter 14

Resolving Data Access Issues

Most business applications have some sort of data access. This fact is not surprising when you consider that conceptually, most businesses are themselves based around data: customers and orders, inventory and purchase information all of this business information needs to be stored in such a way that it can be easily retrieved, edited, and stored again. Countless Microsoft Visual Basic applications have been developed to provide a friendly face for information in databases. Each new version of Visual Basic has delivered enhancements to data access over previous versions. Visual Basic .NET is no exception. With this version, we see continued support for ActiveX Data Objects (ADO) code and data binding. Visual Basic .NET also supports Data Access Objects (DAO) and Remote Data Objects (RDO) code, but it does not support data binding for DAO and RDO. Finally, it introduces a new disconnected type of data access called ADO.NET. This chapter looks at upgrading the three major data access technologies, concentrating on ADO.

The examples in this chapter are all included on the companion CD. They use the Northwind Microsoft Access database. This database is distributed with Microsoft Access, Microsoft Office XP Professional, Visual Basic 6, and various other Microsoft products. The examples in this chapter assume that this database is in the location C:\NWind.mdb. If it is somewhere else, you will need to edit the projects to point to the correct location or move the database to this location.