Professional ASP.NET 3.5 SP1 Edition: In C# and VB

Chapter 8. Data Management with ADO.NET

This chapter provides information on programming with the data management features that are part of ADO.NET, a key component of the .NET Framework and of your ASP.NET development. The discussion begins with the basics of ADO.NET and later dives into the ways you can use various features that make up ADO.NET to manage data contained in a relational database.

ADO.NET, first introduced in version 1.0 of the .NET Framework, provided an extensive array of features to handle live data in a connected mode or data that is disconnected from its underlying data store. ADO.NET 1.0 was primarily developed to address two specific problems in getting at data. The first had to do with the user's need to access data once and to iterate through a collection of data in a single instance. This need often arose in Web application development.

ADO.NET addresses a couple of the most common data-access strategies that are used for applications today. When classic ADO was developed, many applications could be connected to the data store almost indefinitely. Today, with the explosion of the Internet as the means of data communication, a new data technology is required to make data accessible and updateable in a disconnected architecture.

The first of these common data-access scenarios is one in which a user must locate a collection of data and iterate through this data a single time. This is a popular scenario for Web pages. When a request for data from a Web page that ...