Working with Data

Visual C# Tutorials

Database Tutorials

Working with Data Databases Intro to SQL ADO.NET Classes Roll Your Own Database Define Table Structure Reading Rows Adding Rows Storing as XML Filtering Data Connect to Access Connect to SQL Server Data Binding Using DataGridView

© 2006 Jeffery Suddeth

This tutorial—Working with Data—is from Programming C# with Visual Studio .NET 2005, by Jeff Suddeth. Copyright © 2006 Jeffery Suddeth. All rights reserved. This article is reproduced by permission. This tutorial has been edited especially for C# Online.NET.  Read the book review!

This article introduces SQL, shows how to use ADO.NET Datasets, and connect to SQL Server and Microsoft Access databases. It introduces data binding and shows how to build your own SQL Query program that works with Access databases.

Working with Data

Database access is the perfect example of source code reuse. The basic operations are always the same—add, retrieve, update, and delete records. The only thing different is the structure of the data. Yet, each database system has its own native programming library that is not compatible with other databases, making it difficult to port applications to other database systems. So, it is not surprising that numerous database libraries have been developed over the years to encapsulate the implementation details of database operations.

In this article, we talk about how to access a database using ADO.NET—the set of classes that .NET provides for database access.