Building Web Solutions with ASP.NET and ADO.NET

Introduction

Many years ago, when I was just a shy junior programmer, I had a dream. I dreamt of a (perfect?) world in which I never had to figure out which messages to handle in my Microsoft Windows applications. I often caught myself longing for a time when programmers wouldn’t have to search through the hefty Windows SDK tome looking for undocumented functions. I didn’t want to research and refine the best way to export functions from Microsoft Visual C++ to accommodate incoming calls from Microsoft Visual Basic applications. As a first-year student at the Windows University, I found particularly hostile the different programming models that Windows tools featured. My discomfort was not a matter of preferring one language over another—of course ...