With the new release of Visual Studio .NET 2005 Beta 1 and the .NET Framework 2.0 Beta Microsoft has included a lot of nice enhancements to ADO.NET 2.0. By either using the DAAB or writing it your self, you could get generic provider factories. Microsoft has now included this in ADO.NET 2.0 along with a lot of other nice enhancements. For those using SQL Server and wanting to provide a list of servers to your users, we would have to PInvoke SQL DMO. Now there is a new base class called DbEnumerator. The SqlClient support for this class will return a list of SQL servers. There is a ton of features that you can read more about at the following link...
http://msdn.microsoft.com/data/default.aspx?pull=/library/en-us/dnvs05/html/ado2featurematrix.asp