Overview
Over the last few years, the Microsoft platform has accommodated an alphabet soup of acronyms representing various data access technologies, including ODBC (Open Database Connectivity), DAO (Data Access Objects), OLE DB (OLE Database), and ADO (ActiveX Data Objects), which until a few years ago was the preferred data access technology for the Microsoft platform. .NET has changed that.ADO.NET will undoubtedly be the data access technology of choice for modern applications running under .NET. ADO.NET is the managed code alternative to traditional ADO. This chapter is all about data access under .NET. We'll look at connecting to databases, issuing commands to databases, reading data out of databases, and managing data sets using ADO.NET.