Written specifically for COM-based ADO developers retooling for ADO.NET using the C# language, this book brings fresh insights and tips on the ADO.NET technology. Veteran authors William Vaughn and Peter Blackburn have packed this formative guide with practical advice on how to write code that is both faster running and easier to understand.
The onset of the new .NET technology is forcing developers to completely rethink their data access strategies. This book helps you to do this through working examples and numerous discussions of what works and what doesn’t. Derived from years of experience working with data access developers, Vaughn’s Best Practices are a set of techniques proven to drastically reduce overhead, problems, and confusion-for the devleoper, the system, and the entire team. While some are quite simple to implement, others require considerable forethought to enable. This is a developer’s book-full of hints, tips and notes passed on from those who’ve spent significant time in the .NET and C# trenches.
This book is all about using ADO.NET with C# (pronounced C sharp), .NET Framework, and to some extent about how Visual Studio .NET helps you build ADO.NET-based applications. The concepts and code discussed and illustrated here apply (in most cases) to .NET Windows Forms and ASP Web Services and other ADO.NET platforms.
To make the transition to .NET easier for you and to clarify how I view this new technology, I start by helping you get familiar with .NET, its new terminology, and the new ways it allows you to access your data. There are many tutorials on .NET, most of which clearly describe the technology, albeit each from a unique and distinct point of view. In this book, my intended target audience is the experienced COM-based ADO developer. I focus strictly on my personal area of .NET expertise: data access and especially, data access with SQL Server. You might sense a bias in favor of Microsoft SQL Server (guilty) and the SqlClient namespace. Perhaps that’s because I’ve had more experience coding, designing, implementing, testing, and teaching SQL Server than any other DBMS system. Again, in most cases, the OleDb and Odbc namespaces implement the System.Data classes (Microsoft.Data classes in the case of Odbc) in much the same way.
The Odbc .NET Data Provider is not a part of the Visual Studio .NET initial release-you’ll need to download it directly from Microsoft’s Web site. My informal tests show that the Odbc data provider, which uses Platform Invoke (PI), is faster than the OleDb data provider, which uses COM, although it is roughly twenty percent slower than the SqlClient data provider, which uses Tabular Data Stream (TDS). I talk a little more about this later. Before you decide to close your ears to the OleDb data provider for being the tortoise of the pack, just note that at present this is the only data provider that directly supports importing good ol’ ADO Recordsets.
For differences and issues, check our Web sites or the Apress Web site for updates sometime after this book hits the streets.
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