Professional Visual Basic 2012 and .NET 4.5 Programming

Chapter 9

ADO.NET and LINQ

What's in this chapter?

The architecture of ADO.NET

How ADO.NET connects to databases

Using ADO.NET to retrieve data

Using ADO.NET to update databases

Creating and using transactions

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ADO.NET 1.x was the successor to ActiveX Data Objects 2.6 (ADO). The goal of ADO.NET 1.x was to enable developers to easily create distributed, data-sharing applications in the .NET Framework. The goals of ADO.NET today are to improve the performance of existing features in ADO.NET 1.x, to provide easier use, and to add new features without breaking backward compatibility.

Note

Throughout this chapter, when ADO.NET is mentioned without a version number after it (that is, 1.x, 2.0, 3.5, 4 or 4.5), the statement applies to all versions of ADO.NET.

ADO.NET 1.x was built upon industry standards such as XML and XSD, and it provided a data-access interface to communicate with data sources such as SQL Server and Oracle. ADO.NET 4.5 continues to build upon these concepts, while increasing performance. Applications can use ADO.NET to connect to these data sources and retrieve, manipulate, and update data. ADO.NET 4.5 does not break any compatibility with ADO.NET 2.0 or 1.x; it only adds to ...