An Exclusive Interview with Author Fernando Guerrero On How to Get the Most of ADO.NET and SQL Server

The ADO.NET Framework documentation provides a comprehensive starting point for learning about classes, methods and properties available. However, there is not much information on how to do things. I recommend to take a look at the examples installed with the .NET Framework in the samples directory (by default C:\Program Files\Microsoft.NET\FrameworkSDK\Samples\QuickStart\howto\samples) where you can find excellent examples on ADO.NET.

Another excellent resource is the official ADO.NET newsgroup:

News://msnews.microsoft.com/microsoft.public.dotnet.framework.adonet

GotDotNet (http://www.gotdotnet.com) is an excellent resource on .NET overall.

There are many books available on this subject, and I am sure that they will be far more to come. I wouldn't want to mention any particular book here, but everybody agrees that Bill Vaughn is always an important reference in this field.

Microsoft Certified Technical Education Centers (CTECs) offer an excellent official course on this topic: MOC 2389: Programming with ADO.NET (http://www.microsoft.com/TRAINCERT/SYLLABI/2389BFINAL.ASP) 

Besides everything else we have already discussed, do you have any other comments or suggestions on how to get the most out of ADO.NET and SQL Server?

I'd like to mention again the fact that ADO.NET developers should know as much as possible about SQL Server and SQL Server DBAs should know as much as possible about ADO.NET. Only from this mutual understanding we will start running the efficient database applications that could satisfy our users' needs. So .NET developers: you should start thinking in the Transact-SQL way, and SQL DBAs: pay a close visit to the .NET world.

Everything I did mention so far applies to the connected layer, because the way the DataSet work has nothing to do with SQL Server. UI developers can focus in this disconnected layer to provide a rich user experience to the application's users, and they don't need to know how SQL Server works. However, the way a DataSet is filled with data and the way changes to a DataSet are applied back to SQL Server is the full responsibility of the connected layer, and all my comments here apply to them.