Sams Teach Yourself ADO.NET in 21 Days

SqlClient Internals

The SqlClient .NET Data Provider is what I've termed a specific or targeted provider because it's able to communicate with only a single data store; in this case, only SQL Server version 7.0, 2000, and later versions such as the release code-named Yukon. As you learned on Day 8, “Understanding .NET Data Providers,” the reason you would use specific providers is that they offer two main advantages over the general providers such as OleDb and the ODBC provider.

First, specific providers can expose classes, methods, properties, fields, and events that aren't found in the base provider architecture. These additional constructs enable developers to work with the database server more closely because they expose features that are ...