Database Programming with Visual Basic .NET functions as a reference book. But thanks to its many listings and tables, you’ll find value reading it cover to cover! This book is all you need to get started with data access in VB .NET.
Author Carsten Thomsen includes step-by-step coverage of everything you ever wanted to know about ADO.NET. Thomsen also covers relational databases, Active Directory (LDAP) access, and MessageQueue.
MESSAGE QUEUES ARE GREAT whenever you don’t have a permanent connection or in loosely coupled situations. They’re also handy when you simply want to dump your input and return to your application without waiting for the output from whatever application or server will be processing your input. You can make message queues the basis of a fail-safe application that uses them whenever your regular database fails. This can help ensure that no data is lost and you have very little or no downtime at all, if you use transactional queues. Obviously not all applications can use message queues to such advantage, but for storing or accepting customer input it can be a great solution. One situation springs to mind in which using message queues would not be beneficial and that is a banking transaction that needs to be processed in real-time.
Microsoft’s messaging technology is called Message Queuing. Mind you, in line with other traditional Microsoft marketing stunts, this technology has had other names before Windows 2000 was shipped. However, the release that ships with Windows 2000 is built upon a previous version of the technology and includes the Active Directory (AD) integration. AD integration is good because it is now easier to locate public message queues across your domain and it ensures easy Enterprise-wide backup.
