"Essential ADO.NET is a comprehensive guide for developers of data-aware applications who want to transition to Microsoft's new .NET data access architecture. If you want to dig deep into the how's and why's of ADO.NET, this book will prove to be a worthy guide." —Omri Gazitt, Product Manager of ADO.NET and Product Unit Manager, XML, Microsoft "Bob Beauchemin packs a career's worth of knowledge into ten well-organized chapters, each one dense with information and insights. If you work with databases on Windows, buy this book." —David Chappell, Principal of Chappell & Associates Microsoft's ADO.NET enables Windows-based applications to access many types of databases from a variety of different vendors. This technology offers the advantage of cross-database flexibility that is essential for Internet and distributed-computing success. Essential ADO.NET presents a thorough explanation of ADO.NET, exploring in depth the capabilities of classes, interfaces, properties, and methods. This book also examines the structure of data and demonstrates the ways in which ADO.NET can solve data access challenges. In particular, the discussion focuses on how ADO.NET effectively balances the need for generic functionality with efficiency, and how it is specifically designed to address today's need for scalability, concurrency, and robustness. A convenient reference for programmers moving from other data access APIs, including OLE DB, ADO, ODBC, and JDBC, Essential ADO.NET correlates classes and functions from these other APIs to those of ADO.NET. You will find practical information on: How the ADO.NET model can be used to access relational data stores The DataSet class for in-memory data representation How ADO.NET handles concurrency conflict-resolution problems Guidelines for deciding when to use an online stream (DataReader) or offline cache (DataSet) How to map database information using ASP.NET WebForm How ADO.NET integrates relational data storage and XML representation with Microsoft's SQL Server Essential ADO.NET is the most complete source of information for this crucial piece of the new Microsoft platform. Whether you are new to this application or have used it before, this book will help you to understand and get the most out of ADO.NET. 0201758660B05132002