Data Access and Data Binding for the new ASP.NET Developer
Today I'm starting a new series of posts regarding Data Access methods and Data Binding with focus on the new developer. There are a multitude of ways to access data with ASP.NET and I will attempt to go through as many as I can, hopefully digging deep enough for you to get a solid understanding of the pros and cons of each method. We'll be beginning with some of the traditional methods of straight ADO.NET (don't worry if you're lost already we'll get you caught up) and then look at ways we can leverage some best practices and techniques to enhance how we use them and make our lives easier, including the use of the Enterprise Library. Then we will move on to some of the new technologies including LINQ and the Entity Framework. For the binding aspect of the series I will mostly be sticking with the Gridview and the FormView, in the later posts I may branch out to third party controls but I will be keeping it simple to start.
Each post will include Visual Basic and C# code.
Through the tutorial I will be making the assumption that you are using VS2008 or Visual Web Developer 2008 Express Edition. We'll be using SQL Server 2005 Express Edition as our database. So if you need either of those please visit their respective links and install them now and apply any necessary updates.
For the actual data itself we'll be using the AdventureWorksLT database which is a lighter version of the AdventureWorks Database, it should suffice for what we'll be showing. Where it comes up short I'll address that (I'm specifically thinking about a section we'll be covering with a LARGE amount of rows).
UPDATE: After some suggestions I've decided to use Northwind instead. This will make the demos and setup a little simpler.
A lot of the material I will be presenting is probably available in different forms in other places on the web so I will have a "Further Reading" section in most posts so that you can do your own research where necessary. What I hope to bring to the table is some 'real world' application of the techniques and a dialog on the good, the bad and the ugly. I'll show you where the fancy "oohahh" presentations that Microsoft likes to show fall short and where they are appropriate.
In the next post (I'm shooting for Sunday April 13th) I'll walk you through setting up our development environment which will primarily just include the referencing of the AdventureWorksLT Northwind database and making sure we are ready to go.
Here's the next in the series: Data Access Project Setup