Downloadable Free Ebook VB Programming : Introducing Microsoft Visual Basic 2005 for Developers.pdf

Building Datacentric Applications

Chapter 1 introduced you to the basics of ADO.NET and how data access has changed from Visual Basic 6. These next four applications introduce you to the enhancements in Visual Studio 2005 and the .NET Framework 2.0 for building datacentric applications. ADO.NET is a big topic and could easily fill an entire book on its own. These applications are intended as starting points from which you can further research ADO.NET using the MSDN documentation and online resources such as http://msdn.microsoft.com.

One of the most common frustrations for developers is having to learn new versions of a product that make older components obsolete or significantly change the way to do common tasks. The inevitable learning curve can often negatively affect productivity in the short term. Microsoft set a goal for ADO.NET 2.0: enhance and extend it without changing it or breaking what already works. The same functionality from 1.1 is still available in version 2.0, but there are now more productive ways of performing common database tasks. For example, the Data Sources window provides a central place to create and configure the related objects required to access a data source (for example, SQL Server). Smart tags added to controls provide fast access to common development tasks, such as changing the type of a control (for example, changing TextBox to Label). You can also use smart tags to reconfigure data sources and even create new queries to pull out filtered data based on user input (that is, create parameterized queries).

After exploring the next four applications, you will see how Microsoft Visual Studio 2005 andthe .NET Framework 2.0 enhance productivity and make connecting to data sources fromyour application much easier than with previous development tools.