Professional Visual Basic 2012 and .NET 4.5 Programming

ADO.NET Architecture

The main design goals of ADO.NET are:

• Customer-driven features that are still backwardly compatible with ADO.NET 1.x
• Improving performance on your data-store calls
• Providing more power for power users
• Taking advantage of SQL Server–specific features

ADO.NET addresses a couple of the most common data-access strategies 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 just a single time. This is a popular scenario for Web pages. When a request for data from a Web page that you have created is received, you can simply fill a table with data from a data store. In this case, you go to the data store, grab the data that you want, send the data across the wire, and then populate the table. In this scenario, the goal is to get the data in place as fast as possible.

The second way to work with data in this disconnected architecture is to grab a collection of data and use this data separately from the data store itself. This could be on the server or even on the client. Even though the data is disconnected, you want the capability to keep the data (with all of its tables ...