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ADO.NET & ASP.NET ... How to use them to build XML applications.

Article Excerpt
What is ADO.NET? It's the successor to the Active Data Object technology used in classic ASP. What is ASP.NET? It's the successor to Active Server Pages, Microsoft's popular architecture for writing server-side Web applications.

ASP.NET applications run on servers that meet the following requirements:

* Windows NT 4.0 SP6a, Windows 2000, or Windows XP

* Internet Information Server 4.0 or later

* Microsoft.NET Framework 1.0 or later (downloadable from http://msdn.microsoft.com/net/)

ASP.NET applications are typically written in either of two equally powerful, object-oriented languages: VB.NET (the successor to Visual Basic) or C# (the successor to C++). In this article we'll use ASP.NET to write our applications.

ADO.NET implements several improvements:

* Multitable data sets rather than single-table record sets: In ADO.NET a data set can contain multiple tables of data, just like a real database. You can even execute SQL queries against the data in these data sets! In contrast, ADO record sets can store only a single table of information and work with it one row at a time.

* Disconnected data sets versus connected record sets: ADO record sets remained connected to the database, with the ASP application moving a cursor to work with records one at a time. ADO.NET's disconnected data set approach retrieves the data once, eliminating the overhead of constantly paging data from the database.

* Integrated support for XML: ADO.NET data sets can be populated with XML data and can be structured according to an XML Schema. In addition, any data set can have its schema and data exported as XML.

This article introduces the basics of building XML applications using ASP.NET and ADO.NET. Specifically, we'll focus on:

* Producing XML and XML Schemas from data in a database

* Reading XML data into a data set and binding it to Web server controls

* Reading XML data into a data set and inserting it into a database

* Other ASP.NET/ADO.NET XML capabilities

About the Database ...

In this article we'll use a Microsoft Access database storing programs, viewers, and orders for the ".NET Network," a fictitious pay-per-view network aimed at programmers. The relationship among the three tables in the database is shown in Figure 1.

[FIGURE 1 OMITTED]

For production applications you'll want to use a "real" client/server database such as SQL...

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